We are regularly told that solar energy is the cheapest form of energy there is. (I haven’t bothered to provide a link – search the internet, and you’ll find hundreds, possibly thousands, of articles claiming as much). And so I was intrigued by a series of three articles on the BBC website in the last month, which seemed to my mind to cast doubt on that claim – at least so far as the UK is concerned. They are all in respect of a proposed new solar farm (East Pye) in Norfolk, and the common theme of the articles is that the development, planned to cover 2,700 acres, will cost £1 billion. The articles, should you want to check them out for yourself, can be found here, here and here.

One of the articles claims that it will make it the UK’s most expensive solar farm, even more expensive than that for Botley West in Oxfordshire, which another BBC article informs us will cost £800 million. And while the BBC tells us that it is claimed that Botley West will power “the equivalent of 330,000 homes” (whatever that means, in the context of an energy source that is regularly unavailable at times of greatest need – early morning; late evening; winter), we are also told that East Pye, despite its greater projected cost and landscape coverage, will only “generate enough power for 115,000 homes.”. Botley West, by the way, is planned to cover 2,471 acres.

So far as East Pye is concerned, the BBC seems to have uncritically accepted the claim made on the website of the Australian developer (“East Pye Solar Limited is a 100 per cent subsidiary of IGP UK Projects Limited, which is in turn a 100 per cent subsidiary of Island Green Power’s UK group holding company, Island Green Power Group Limited (IGP). The company is wholly owned by Macquarie Asset Management, via its managed funds), which claims:

East Pye Solar is anticipated as being able to deliver up to 500 megawatts (MW) of electricity. This is enough clean, reliable energy to power approximately 115,000 homes annually.

In the absence of a BBC Verify article dissecting the claims relating to Botley West and East Pye I will, for the purposes of the following analysis only, accept them at face value. After all, I am confident that the developers have claimed the maximum number of homes to be powered by their developments that they feel they can justify, so accepting their claims is, for my purposes, very much giving solar power the benefit of the doubt.

In a comment under an earlier article by Jit, I observed, with regard to East Pye, that:

…if we simply relied on solar farms such as this, it would cost around £250 billion (on the basis that this solar farm is said to cost £1bn) to provide power to all the UK’s homes. But that ignores the needs of industry and commerce for power, it ignores all the electricity demanded by the ongoing net zero project (“decarbonising transport, heating, cooking, etc), and it ignores the costs of enabling the grid to cope. These costs are insane.

The other point is that it will take 2,700 acres – to power (supposedly) 115,000 homes. That’s just 42-43 homes per acre. That’s also insane.

Since East Pye seems to be extraordinarily inefficient in terms of cost and area of landscape covered, I thought that perhaps I was being too harsh. In the interests of fairness, therefore, I would like to analyse the cost and effectiveness of solar power in the UK, based on an average of the figures relating to East Pye and (the seemingly more efficient) Botley West.

Take together, their developers claim that they will power 445,000 homes (or their equivalent), i.e. 330,000 + 115,000. According to the Office for National Statistics in 2025, there were 29 million households in the UK. So, even accepting at face value the reather dubious claims about the numbers of households that can be powered by these two planned solar farms (i.e. leaving out of the calculation the need for back-up, due to their inability to power anything at night and anything much in winter), that means that we would – if we relied entirely on solar – need more than 65 combined Botley Wests and East Pyes to power all the UK’s households. That implies a cost of £117.3 billion. It would also require (2,471 + 2,700) 5,171 acres to be multiplied by that same figure, thus covering 333,986.5 acres of our landscape with solar panels and related infrastructure (though that doesn’t count the pylons, cables etc that would be required to bring the electricity generated by the solar farms to the places where the electricity would be used). At 640 acres to the square mile, that would cover 521.85 square miles.

Perhaps that doesn’t sound quite so bad? That’s an area representing rather more than half of, say, the Lake District National Park. The problem, however, is the amount of electricity used by UK households represents a rather small proportion of the UK’s total energy use, and the plan is to electrify the economy in order to achieve Net Zero by 2050. Working out precisely what proportion of UK energy use is represented by household electricity use isn’t straightforward, since official databases, such as this, don’t provide the answer neatly packaged. They do, however, allow us to make a stab at answering the question, and the answer is probably that the electricity used by UK households represents around 7-8% of the UK’s total energy demand.

Quite apart from demonstrating the absurdly difficult task that is represented by the legal obligation to achieve Net Zero by 2050, it also puts the solar power data into perspective. Let’s be generous and go with the 8% figure, rather than 7%. That means we have to multiply the figures above by 12.5 in order to see what Net Zero 2050 would cost, if we relied only on solar power. Suddenly, 117.3 billion becomes closer to £1.5 trillion (actually £1,466,250 billion). And 521.85 square miles covered by solar panels and ancillary BESS etc becomes over 6,500 square miles (actually 6,523.125). That’s more than seven times the size of the Lake District National Park.

Oh, but you’re being disingenuous, critics will say. We’re not going to rely on solar power for all of our energy needs – there’s be lots of onshore and offshore wind, nuclear, and still a small amount of gas back-up. That’s the plan, certainly, and if implemented, it will reduce the amount of land covered in solar panels – perhaps just one or two Lake District National Park equivalents, rather than seven. But (and here’s the rub), if solar really is the cheapest form of energy (as we’re constantly being told) then not relying totally on solar power must mean that the cost of Net Zero must exceed £1.5 trillion by a significant factor.

Also, far from being disingenuous, I am actually being quite generous. Solar farms in Norfolk and in Oxfordshire are further south than many that are being planned elsewhere in the UK. Those further north are likely to be less efficient, and therefore more costly, with a need to cover more land to generate the same amount of useful power. The above costs don’t take into account the significant costs of extending the grid to cope with disparate and far-flung renewables. Net Zero is simply unaffordable.

Postscript – the UK Government’s Solar Roadmap

While researching this article, I stumbled across a Freedom of Information (FOI) response from December 2025 on the part of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). The FOI question asked was this:

DESNZ ministers and spokespeople frequently cite that ground mounted solar energy plants will only take up 0.4% of all UK land according to the governments ‘most ambitious scenarios’. Please can you provide all sources, calculations and workings that show how the government arrived at this figure?

Please can you also provide information on how much agricultural land this is equivalent to as a percentage of UK agricultural land, as most ground mounted solar is sited on farm land?

The response was quite revealing, as it discussed the plan only up to 2030, not to 2050. The answer was as follows:

If all new capacity modelled under the current policy scenario (high end) in the ‘Solar roadmap’ were to be ground mount, it would occupy no more than 0.6% of the UK’s utilised agricultural land by 2030.

It was based on the assumption that the total UK utilised agricultural land area is 16.8 million hectares (or roughly 42 million acres). So by 2030 (not 2050) DESNZ assumes that up to 252,000 acres might be covered in solar panels. Perhaps my initial estimate of 333,986.5 acres to provide electricity to the UK’s households wasn’t so wide of the mark.

The other interesting aspect of this is represented by the Annexes to the Solar Roadmap. Annex 2 offers some nuggets:

…Other Balance of System (BoS) components for solar mainly consist of transformers, switch gear, invertors, high voltage cabling and steel racking, many of which are also used in the construction of other energy projects such as wind and grid infrastructure. The supply chains for these BoS components have a more diverse geographical spread with key manufacturers located in Europe, Japan, US, India, and China. However, recent research commissioned by DESNZ from Baringa15, suggests that bottlenecks in parts of these international supply chains are leading to procurement delays for some components with lead times increasing from 16 to 24 months for transformers and from 4 to 12 months for switchgear. More broadly there is also an electrical steel shortage due to the Ukraine war….

...Batteries enable us to use energy more flexibly, for example maximising the usable output from intermittent renewable technologies such as wind and solar and helping to balance the grid. Increased demand for utility scale and residential scale batteries has been seen, with residential solar and storage products often installed together. The UK relies heavily on importing batteries and their components, in 2022, the UK imported nearly £1.8 billion worth of lithium-ion battery packs, of which around £0.9 billion came from China, £0.3 billion from Germany, and £0.1 billion from Japan…

…in the short term it is possible that potential new manufacturers and industry will move away from the UK to take advantage of the support in other countries….

…In 2021, UKEF announced a £217M guarantee to support the construction of Turkey’s largest solar facility. The transaction supported over 100 British jobs as the integration of the solar technology and the assembly of the solar power station will occur in the UK….[OK, it’s neither a grant nor a loan, but if the guarantee is called upon, it will mean that each of those jobs cost over £2M].

Annex 3 offers an example of how Big Brother is Nudging You.

All in all, it makes for rather depressing reading. I thought the grown-ups were supposed to be back in charge. Clearly I have been misinformed.