The Scottish government has granted planning permission for the country’s largest solar PV project. Holyrood’s Energy Consents Unit (ECU) has given consent for its first solar project – Elgin Energy’s plans for a 50MW plant on a former RAF airfield in Moray. Approximately 200,000 solar PV modules will be deployed at the airfield, which was decommissioned in the 1970s. Since then it has been used for heavy goods vehicle testing and sheep grazing. The ECU has calculated the plant will generate enough electricity to meet annual demand of just over 10,000 households in Scotland, saving 17,900 tonnes of CO2 per annum over grid mix. In its letter to Elgin, the ECU says the proposal is supported by national Scottish policies to promote solar PV development and that any adverse environmental impacts are outweighed by the benefits of renewable energy. It also cites the commitment in the National Planning Framework 3 to establish Scotland as a leading location for the development of renewable energy technology.
Edie 31st May 2018 read more »
Google’s Project Sunroof encourages consumers to switch to solar panels by estimating savings. Tech company Google will now offer a solar power service that allows users to find out how much money they would save by switching to solar panels by measuring solar potential. The project, which is in cooperation with energy company E.ON, is called Project Sunroof and uses data from Google Earth and Maps to determine savings. Released originally in the US in 2015 to test the accuracy of the technology, the online service is now available in the UK. German software company Tetraeder was also involved in developing the technology.
City AM 31st May 2018 read more »
The price of domestic solar in the UK has failed to decline – and even rose marginally – in the two years since the feed-in tariff was revised, government statistics have revealed. Data released by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) this morning revealed that between April 2017 and March 2018, the median cost of installing residential-scale (sub-4kW) solar in the UK stood at around £1,701 per kilowatt. The cost data is produced by BEIS using data sourced from the Microgeneration Certificate Scheme database of completed installations, producing an average from the 19,708 installations the database included. The figures, released annually, reveal that the cost of installing solar at the residential scale has failed to fall as expected in the UK under the revised feed-in tariff scheme, and in fact has risen slightly under.
Solar Power Portal 31st May 2018 read more »
