- It is a 100-acre, 25.4MW bifacial array with 47,088 bifacial modules that can power up to 9,500 homes.
- The UK government plans to grow its current 14GW solar capacity by up to five times by 2035.
Enviromena, a renewable generator, has switched on its first UK solar farm in Winchester after developing projects in the Middle East and North Africa. It is a 100-acre, 25.4MW bifacial array with 47,088 bifacial modules that can power up to 9,500 homes. The energy generated from the site will feed into the national grid via a connection to a nearby substation. Enviromena is headquartered in the UK, with solar farms already functional in Jordan, Dubai, Egypt, and Morocco.
In April last year, the UK government planned to grow its current 14GW solar capacity by up to five times by 2035. The UK, Enviromena’s European Development Director Mark Harding said: “Various projects across solar and storage are in the pipeline to be located across England and Wales, with capacity ranging from small-scale sub-10MW to large-scale battery schemes 100MW+.”
The project’s completion comes a few weeks after former UK prime minister Liz Truss cast serious doubt over the future of solar farms in the UK by moving to ban solar projects from much of England’s farmland. This stance was also held by her successor Rishi Sunak, who wrote for The Telegraph in August that under his watch, the UK “will not lose swathes of our best farmland to solar farms”. He added that solar panels should be installed only “on commercial buildings, sheds and properties”.