1.2MWp
Installed
The renders are tidy. The field is muddy, hilly, and took nearly four years.
Positech Energy — owned & run by Cliff Harris
One 1.2 megawatt array on a Shropshire sheep farm — and the real financials almost no one else will publish.
The renders are tidy. The field is muddy, hilly, and took nearly four years.
Positech Energy — owned & run by Cliff Harris
Positech Energy was formed in March 2021 as a UK limited company with a single aim: to develop solar generation in Britain. It's owned and run by Cliff Harris — a long-time environmentalist who also created and runs Positech Games, the independent studio behind titles like Gratuitous Space Battles and Democracy.
The first development is a 1.2 MWp array in Shropshire. Planning permission came through in October 2022; after a construction saga measured in years and emails, the site is now live and feeding the grid. It sits on a working sheep farm, and the sheep never had to leave.
The point of this site is simple. Profit was never the prime motivation — doing something real about the climate emergency was. But the farm is profitable, and almost no solar operator will show you their actual books. This one will.
Hardly any solar farm shares its real financial data. This is our complete first full year of operation — income in, every cost out, and what was left.
A subsidy-free small solar farm doesn't make anyone rich. It quietly generates clean power, holds its value, and pays a steady real-world return — no feed-in tariff, no government backing.
"Our first solar farm is profitable — though that was never why we built it."
At the scale a small company can actually operate, the choice makes itself.
Consent for solar in the UK is far more attainable than for wind — the difference between a project that happens and one that doesn't.
Tidal, wind and geothermal need enormous capital. Solar works at a size one determined person can finance and build.
No moving parts to speak of. Panels sit in the sun; sheep keep the grass down. That's most of the operating plan.
As of 2026 UK solar is entirely subsidy-free — unlike nuclear, it stands on its own in an open market with no state backing.
From the first mounting posts to the moment an inverter finally showed a live grid connection — after almost four years of trying.
The site sits on a working sheep farm that keeps full access to the land for the farm's entire lifetime. The flock grazes happily between the rows — keeping the grass down, keeping the field in agriculture, and doing the mowing for free.
Cliff blogs the development in detail — the real process of getting a solar farm built in the UK, delays and all.