We’re charging ahead with our sun parks
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At Ecotricity, all our profits go towards researching and building more green energy.
We’re moving as quickly as we can because it’s the best way to fight the climate crisis. Here’s an update of what’s happening at our sun park projects across Britain right now.
Ecotricity CEO, Asif Rehmanwala, caught up with our Generation Director, Steve Ellis, at Bulkworthy to talk about our new bifacial solar panels, how we’re helping the grid by using the existing infrastructure at our wind farm next door and our plans to boost biodiversity on the site.
Our new sun parks
We’re building two new sun parks which should be up and running this year. They’ll generate around 16MW in total, which is enough to power around 5,000 homes.
Our sun park in Bulkworthy, Devon, is making great progress. The piles for the frames to stand on are finished, and the 23,000 solar panels themselves started arriving on 2 August. One month on, we’ve installed over a quarter of them, and things are moving quickly.
In Dalby, Leicestershire, construction on the piles for the frames started at the end of July and is now nearly finished. We plan to start installing the solar panels any day.
Heckington Fen Sun Park
Our latest planned project in the fight against climate crisis, the Heckington Fen Sun Park in Lincolnshire, would power the equivalent of over 100,000 homes with affordable green electricity and prevent around 75,000 tonnes of harmful emissions every year.
It’s important we get it right – for the climate, for nature and also for the local community. We ran an initial consultation that ended in December 2021, following which we’ve developed a new site layout, creating a longer circular walking route and adding a community orchard. We’ll make the rest of the land biodiversity net gain areas, helping pollinators to flourish.
The exact design hasn’t been decided yet and we ran a formal consultation to hear local people’s views on how to achieve the site’s full potential, which ended on 1 September 2022. We’re now updating our proposals in readiness to submit our application to the Planning Inspectorate next year.
We’ve had lots of great questions from customers about our solar parks and our plans to improve biodiversity, so many in fact that we’ve written an article to answer them all. You can read it here.
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