For most of the last century, the power stations along the River Trent in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire burned coal for Britain’s national grid. Ratcliffe-on-Soar was the last to close, in September 2024, bringing down the curtain on 142 years of coal-fired power in Britain.
The coal itself often came from close by. In Nottinghamshire, mining shaped whole towns and villages for generations. When the industry was nationalised in 1947, the county had 49 collieries. Thoresby, in Sherwood Forest, was the final pit to shut down, in July 2015, bringing centuries of mining in the Midlands to an end, and deep coal mining in Britain stopped a few months later with the closure of Kellingley in Yorkshire. With the pits and the power stations gone, what remains is now one of the most sought-after assets in the energy transition: large, high-voltage grid connections.
West Burton gets a second life
RES’s Steeple project is the latest development to put these connections to use. RES won development consent for the scheme near Sturton-le-Steeple on 9 October, combining around 450 MW of solar with a 150 MW battery. It sits next to the decommissioned West Burton power station on the banks of the Trent and will tap into the existing grid capacity in the area. RES expects the solar element to cover the needs of around 180,000 homes a year, and construction is planned for 2027 to 2029. “This area in Nottinghamshire has a proud energy history,” said Karl O’Mullan, RES’s solar development director, who sees the project as continuing that tradition.
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Steeple was the second large solar farm approved in as many days, after Island Green Power’s 500 MW Green Hill scheme in Northamptonshire on 8 October, and it is the third solar project of national scale to be approved under energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh.
Next to Steeple, the old West Burton site is being fitted out for a major battery installation. On the same former coal site, Fidra Energy reached financial close in July on its West Burton C battery, a 500 MW/1.1 GWh system backed by £231 million in debt. Construction is due to start this year, with full operation planned for 2028, and the battery already has a 15-year capacity market contract from October 2028.
Other sites on the river
A few miles up the Trent, yet another old coal site is getting a second life. Approved in 2024, Island Green Power’s 600 MW Cottam Solar Project, with battery storage, will take over the grid connection that once carried coal power from the Cottam station. The station closed in 2019 after 51 years, and its eight cooling towers have since been brought down. Further south, near Ratcliffe-on-Soar, where the Soar meets the Trent, a large battery project won planning permission on appeal once the power station had closed.
Further north, Fidra is building the UK’s largest battery, a 1.4 GW/3.1 GWh system, at Thorpe Marsh in South Yorkshire. It stands on part of the site of a coal power station that closed in 1994, leaving behind a grid connection of 1,450 MW.
For the new wave of developers, old power stations offer the closest thing to a ready-made grid connection to be found in Britain. New connections have become scarce and slow – the queue for access swelled to more than 700 GW of projects before the government and grid operator began clearing out speculative projects. At sites like West Burton or Cottam, the substations are already standing and the local wires carried large amounts of power for decades, which can save developers years of delay.
A crowded countryside
But not everyone is happy about the new solar landscape. The cluster of projects around the old stations has made Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire key areas for solar development, and some local residents have begin to push back. Countryside charity CPRE has warned that many of the largest solar farms are being built on good farmland, and objected in particular to the loss of agricultural land in Lincolnshire.
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The criticism came to a head last year, when the government approved the Tillbridge Solar Project, which covers around 3,000 acres of Lincolnshire farmland. CPRE’s research suggests that almost 60 percent of the biggest solar farms are being built on Britain’s best agricultural land, while too many rooftops are left unused. “We don’t need mega solar farms in the countryside,” said Roger Mortlock, the charity’s chief executive. Developers, for their part, point to the benefits they bring locally. RES says its package for communities near Steeple could include a scheme offering discounts on local electricity bills, and Island Green Power has pledged a biodiversity net gain of at least 47 percent at Green Hill.
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For now, the grid is winning the argument. Projects that can plug into an existing connection have a head start that few greenfield sites can match, and while grid reform is still working through the queue, this advantage will probably hold for the next few years. If the current plans go ahead, the West Burton battery will be running by 2028 and Steeple’s panels will be in the ground by the end of the decade. By then, the wires that carried coal power out of the Trent valley for decades will be carrying solar and stored power instead. (TF)
