The UK’s first solar farm to power a waste treatment plant has been built in Cambridgeshire.
Solarcentury, which built the facility along with Lightsource Renewable Energy, said the 5MW solar park is expected to supply more than 70% of electricity to the AmeyCespa’s Mechanical Biological Treatment plant in Waterbeach.
The farm, which has 20,000 solar panels, is expected to generate around 4,552MWh of energy every year, enough to power more than 1,200 homes.
Frans van den Heuvel, CEO of Solarcentury said: “Rather than the plant being connected to export into the grid, there has been significant engineering work to provide 3km of cabling from the plant running directly to local waste management company AmeyCespa.
“Unlike most utility scale ground mounted solar plants in the country, this solar plant prioritises the use of electricity by AmeyCespa’s facilities first, with minimal excess energy being fed back into the National Grid.”
Lightsource will supply the energy to the waste management company through a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for 25 years.
September 20th, 2012 at 4:12 pm
Thanks for taking the time to highlight this. We feel this is an important step for solar energy in the UK.
September 20th, 2012 at 4:47 pm
I suspect this plant is only sustainable due to very large subsidies being paid by domestic and industrial users of Electricity
I take it that the installed capacity is 5MW however the average output over a year is only 0.5MW
Real figures explaining the true economics would be an interesting read, how about it???
October 3rd, 2012 at 1:10 pm
I agree, I would like to see more figures of actual generation and consumption.
For example there is little to no direct sunlight after the Red DUoS period (4/5-7pm) which is when high consuming industrial processes are ramped up to compensate for the reduced processing during the window. Therefore, potentially there wouldn’t be the PV energy available when the site required it the most and so grid electricity would have to be used. I assume the site exports to grid when the PV generation is higher than the demand of the WTW?