Stroud District Council refused the planning application in December 2025.
October 7, 2026
UK-headquartered clean energy developer Pathfinder Clean Energy (PACE) has secured planning permission for a 49.5MW solar plant in Gloucestershire following an appeal.
Stroud District Council refused the planning application in December 2025. It rejected the project, Wheatenhurst Solar Farm, on the grounds of negative visual impact, lack of biodiversity net gain, habitats regulation and construction traffic management.
When PACE submitted its appeal to the Planning Inspectorate (PINS) in April this year, it said that those reasons for refusal reflected “information gaps at the point of determination, influenced by the limited timeframe available for submission, rather than fundamental planning objections”.
PINS found that the substantial weight that the planning policy framework gives to the benefits of clean energy projects outweighs the possible drawbacks of the project, which PINS does not uphold in several of the areas raised by the council.
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This is consistent with how most appeals play out: a local planning council’s objections are ultimately overruled at appeal due to the government’s current emphasis on clean energy. Statkraft recently won an appeal for a 32MW solar power plant in Cornwall, and so did British Solar Renewables for a 29MW solar plant.
That is not to say that developers do not hear or respond to the concerns of refusing councils. In the case of the PACE project, new plans were seen by PINS that no longer include some of the grid connection infrastructure that would have caused negative visual impact, for example.
Also, although it is increasingly common for renewables projects to win at appeal, something also seen with battery energy storage systems (BESS), the process still comes at an additional cost to developers, if not directly incurred then as a result of the delays that an initial refusal causes.
The appeals process more than doubles the time between an initial submission and an approval. According to figures from Solar Media Market Research, there are 42 UK solar plants with appeals pending or lodged, with combined capacity of just under 2GWp.
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Molly Green
Section Editor, Informa
Molly joined the team in 2024 and has led coverage on the UK sites. Now shifting to a more global view, Molly is interested in how legislation shapes market dynamics, covering the intersection of policy design, investment patterns, and energy transition pathways.
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