There may be more than 250 solar farms in the UK at present, with that figure expected to exceed 1,000 by the end of the decade, but it’s believed that there’s only one large-scale floating solar installation on these shores.
The 200kW collection of 800 panels in question, mounted on plastic floats, can be found on a reservoir at Berkshire’s Sheeplands Farm, which rents land to berry giant Hall Hunter for soft-fruit production. The installation was unveiled towards the end of last year.
Sheeplands Farm owner Mark Bennett has also signed a deal with French firm Ciel et Terre, which developed the floating technology, to distribute the panel systems in the UK through his newly-formed company, Floating Solar UK.
The technology, which Bennett says is “huge” in Japan, cost Sheeplands Farm £250,000 to install, and it’s thought that it might also be the only large-scale installation of its kind in the whole of Europe.
As to why he set upon introducing such a pioneering solution to the UK green technology market, Bennett says: “Hall Hunter told us that they needed a water storage reservoir to irrigate the soft-fruit production, so we built them that, and that’s when we saw the dead space that was on it.We thought it’d be a waste to build more panels on land, when it could be used for fruit production.
“We’ve had hundreds of enquiries from people interested in installing the system since, lots of them fresh produce companies, as nine-tenths of them have big pumping stations using lots ofelectricity.”While the Sheeplands Farm installation only spans an acre, Bennett believes future projects could be as much as 100 times bigger.
Despite this noteworthy innovation in the occasionally controversy-marred world of solar panels, global sales of which increased by 20 per cent in 2014, land-based installations remain the most common means of getting them on site for businesses, especially those involved in fresh produce production.
In 2013, root veg firm Alan Bartlett & Sons installed what was then the UK’s largest privately-owned roof-mounted solar photovoltatic (PV) installation at its Cambridgeshire site to deliver energy savings and added income.The £1 million, 1.2MW investment – with a seven-year payback – contributes 20 per cent to the firm’s overall electricity usage, illustrating why Alan Bartlett decided to adopt the technology.
The same sum was more recently spent on the latest solar technology at Portsmouth International Port, with 4,500 solar panels installed on the roofs of warehouses belonging to MMD, the fruit importer owned by Portsmouth City Council.
And it’s not just the suppliers of retailers making these investments either – the supermarkets themselves are in on the act.There are currently about 135,500 PV panels across Sainsbury’s stores and depots nationwide, and the retailer is now the largest multi-roof solar panel operator in all of Europe. Sainsbury’s hopes to have 170,000 panels generating 40MW by spring 2015.
And then there’s Marks & Spencer, which is building the UK’s largest array of rooftop solar panels on its distribution centre in Castle Donington, Leicestershire.
Spread across 900,000 sq ft with more than 24,000 PV panels, the system will generate nearly enough energy in daylight hours to power the distribution centre that handles all the goods M&S sells via its online store.On roofs and on water, if the future’s bright, the future’s solar.
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