Gareth Phillips

Gareth is a lawyer who specialises in the consenting, financing, acquisition and disposal of energy related infrastructure, particularly wind and solar projects. Gareth advised Hive Energy and Wirsol Energy on the development consent order application, granted in May 2020, for the first solar project to qualify as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (“NSIP”) in England, the 350MW Cleve Hill Solar Park. That project heralded a new era of utility scale solar projects across the UK. He is currently advising on five solar NSIPs, ranging from 300MW to 1.1GW, at the pre-application stage, with several others in the pipeline. Gareth is a member of the National Infrastructure Planning Association and Solar Energy UK, through which he helps to steer reform of the NSIP regime and energy related National Policy Statements (“NPS”). In January 2022, Gareth was called to give evidence to the BEIS Select Committee reviewing those NPS