Ground-mount solar refers to PV arrays installed on the ground rather than on a building roof. For commercial and industrial sites, this is typically appropriate when there is unused land adjacent to the operational facility, common on agricultural sites, large industrial estates, MoD sites, schools and universities, and underutilised brownfield land.
Ground-mount projects scale beyond what most rooftops can accommodate. Where a typical commercial rooftop installation might be 200-1000 kWp, a ground-mount can comfortably reach 1-5 MWp on a few acres of land. This brings better per-kWp economics due to scale.
Key planning considerations: ground-mount installations above 1 MWp generally require full planning permission. Land use change (e.g. from agricultural to "energy generation") triggers planning policy considerations including landscape impact, ecology, archaeology, and best-and-most-versatile (BMV) agricultural land protection. Sites in AONBs, National Parks, conservation areas or near listed buildings face higher planning bars.
Grid connection is the dominant cost and timeline driver for ground-mount. Projects above ~500 kWp typically require G99 connection with the local DNO, and in heavily-constrained DNO areas (NGED, UKPN, SP Energy Networks in particular regions) the connection wait can be 5-15 years for new high-capacity connections. Existing site connections that can be re-purposed are gold dust.
For agricultural sites, there are additional opportunities: solar can be combined with grazing ("agrivoltaics"), and Permitted Development Rights have been expanded for solar on certain agricultural buildings. Battery storage co-location is increasingly common to time-shift export and capture price arbitrage.