A 50MW solar farm has been approved at a former RAF airfield, giving UK-based firm Elgin Energy the greenlight to develop Scotland’s largest consented solar project in the early 2020s.

The development went into planning in August 2017 and is the first solar project to be approved by the Energy Consents Unit (ECU) of the Scottish Government, which rules on projects of 50MW or greater in output.

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It will be built at Milltown Airfield near Elgin in Moray, a former RAF Airfield on land owned by the Innes Estate. The ECU has allowed a five-year time scale for the commencement of development of the project owing to “the scale and complexity” of the project.

Unlike the majority of subsidy-free solar farms going into the screening process of development, the planning and decision documents for Elgin’s project make no mention of energy storage, instead relying on its scale of capacity to be commercially viable.

The company previously described the size of the project as “symptomatic of the changing support regime for projects of this kind”.

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