“What we don’t want to see on farmers’ land is solar panels up and down the country. There’s literally thousands of square miles on farmland.”
During a Q&A at Reform UK’s party conference last week, party chair Lee Anderson claimed that solar panels cover “thousands of square miles on farmland” in the UK.
This is wrong and in fact a substantial overstatement. Most solar farms in the UK are built on farmland, but the total area of land estimated to be covered by them is much less than a thousand square miles.
Image courtesy of Sungrow EMEA
In September 2024, ground-mounted solar panels covered “an estimated 21,200 hectares (52,000 acres)” or “around 0.1 per cent of the total land area of the UK”, according to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).
21,200 hectares is equivalent to approximately 81.9 square miles, or about 0.1% of the total UK land area of 24,438,000 hectares.
The DESNZ told Full Fact this remains its latest estimate.
In July 2025 researchers at Lancaster University produced a slightly lower estimate of up to 17,364 hectares, or 67 square miles. They estimated that of this, around 10,118 hectares (39 square miles) may have previously been arable or horticulture land.
We’ve contacted Mr Anderson for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.
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Future estimates
The government’s UK Solar Roadmap sets out that under the government’s Clean Power Action Plan, “around 0.4% of total UK land” would be required for solar by 2030.
It’s worth noting that this figure is based on what the government describes as a “very unlikely” scenario in which all new solar capacity is developed as ground-mounted infrastructure, with no new rooftop solar.
The Lancaster University report estimates that under this scenario, a total of around 96,500 hectares (373 square miles) would be required for solar capacity. If all this was deployed on agricultural land, this would represent around 0.83% of total UK farmland.
Opponents of solar farm expansion have frequently cited a much higher figure of 655,000 acres (around 1,023 square miles) as the amount of farmland set to be covered by solar panels, which appears to be based on a report that claims this is the amount of land solar farms in the “pipeline” would cover by 2035.
The report cites the National Energy Systems Operator’s register of projects that hold contracts for Transmission Entry Capacity (TEC). This is a live database, so we’ve not been able to verify this exact figure, which the report says is from June 2025. But it’s worth being clear that many of the projects listed in this register will ultimately not be taken forward.
The 655,000 acres estimate is far higher than even the most ambitious scenario considered by researchers at Lancaster University, which it estimated would require 173,700 hectares of solar capacity (671 square miles) by 2050. And regardless, it’s still less than the “thousands of acres” claimed by Mr Anderson.
