Anglesey Council Gives the Go-Ahead for Wales’ Largest Solar Installation

The Council of Isle of Angsley just approved the plans for what is going to be, at least in theory, Wales's largest photo voltaic park, a 15 MW solar array located at Tai Moelion Farm on Bodorgan Estate in Anglesey.

The local council authorized the  project for 25 years of operation only after the solar developer New Forest Energy  promised to continue to work with the Gwynedd Archeological Planning Service, in an archaeological work on the future solar park site.


New Forest Energy is a wood fuel producer group and was established in 2009,located  in the south west corner of the New Forest National Park, situated within 15 miles of Bournemouth, Poole, Christchurch and Southampton.
The founder members of the producer group are 3 forest owners located around the Hinton estate.


The solar developer told us that the proposed solar park will be raised on 30 hectares of pasture land and it will become the Wales's biggest photo voltaic installation when it will be operational.

The project consists of 6 large fields with a total of 64 000 solar modules, with large areas left between the rows of PV-panels, in order to enable grazing to continue, as the site will be used for both generating solar power as well for agriculture.

 The timetable of the project is 3 months, upon completion the project will connect to the national power grid  via the 33kv overhead lines already installed, the solar array will produce enough carbon free energy to power 4500 households every year.

For more information and news about solar energies in the UK, you may visit here anytime:  

http://www.solar-energy.co.uk/

Solar Park of 75-hectare planned by ADAS in Oxfordshire

Great news for the green hearted liberals in Oxfordshire, as one local farmer is planning to build the largest solar PV installation in the area, with a little help from his friends from ADAS.

The solar array will have 75 hectare and will be built on the land between Barton and Beckley, the project will be supervised by one of the United Kingdom's most important environmental consultancies, the well known ADAS, with the headquarters in Wolverhamtpon.

Even if a formal planning application is still missing in action, the pre-proposal documents had been drafted to   the local authorities from South Oxfordshire District Council, and after taking a closer look, they revealed the  detailed plans to instal the 50.600 solar panels all over the area. ADAS estimated that the solar farm will generate enough power to provide for over 3000 households.

 As usual, not everybody was happy with the new high tech solution for providing clean energy to people's homes, the locals affiliated to the Campaign to Protect Rural England had to object, as Mr. Michael Tyce, from CPRE Oxfordshire told us:


 "Oxford is surrounded by hills so even if the panels aren’t very high and could be disguised by bushes and trees it would be seen from all around from higher ground.
“The Oxford green belt is there to preserve the openness of the countryside, and you are not doing this when you cover it in panels. However you try to dress this up, it is a power station. An industrial project like this is unacceptable.”  


Anyway, the local residents, despite the Campaign to Protect Rural England objections, responded pretty well to the idea of building the huge solar farm in their vicinity, as the local media covered the issue, stating that the public response was  overwhelmingly positive.

This local project came as a consequence of he Department of Energy and Climate Change’s announcement from the last year, regarding the Renewable Obligation support levels for solar in the future. You must keep in mind that the available RO rate for ground-mounted solar projects is due to drop from 2ROCs to 1.6ROCs on April 1, 2013, the rate was raised after the industry complained that the initial plan of dropping the RO rate to 1.5 ROCs would kill many businesses.

For more information and news about solar energies in the UK, you may visit here anytime:  

http://www.solar-energy.co.uk/