Because we happened to be (vaguely) in the same part of the country, we decided to go pay a quick visit to the solar farm. Its been energized for about 8 months now, although there have been 2 periods of downtime for some work since then, so we still do not yet have a nice clean 6 months of data to extrapolate from. Also I had my drone with me to take ‘finished farm’ pictures :D.
The situation with the farm is that it is 99% finished. There is some tree planting to do (one of the planning constraints), which will have to wait until later in the year, and also it has a problem regarding shutdown. When the site loses power (due to a grid outage), it then does NOT come right back online automatically, which is frustrating. It should, and its back to negotiations between the construction company and the DNO as to why this doesn’t work yet, and fixing it.
From my point of view, there are also two other things that are still *not done* yet. These are, to get a maintenance contract in place (we are still waiting for quotes from fire suppression system inspectors) and also to get ofgem to finally accept that this is indeed a solar farm. That last point is especially irritating, but I finally think, 8 months after switching on that we are close to the end game on that one. The bureaucracy is insane. Why they need to know how many panels are on each string of each inverter is beyond me. The DNO didn’t even care about this, and we connect this kit to THEIR network… As a reminder, this is so we get accredited to produce REGOs, which are certificates to prove a MWH of power was renewable. You can sell those certificates for about £10 each to companies who want to claim their power is 100% renewable.
Anyway…
Its always pretty cool to see the site, and remember that I actually own it! I love my 10 home solar panels, so going to see the other 3,024 is pretty cool. I was surprised just how NOISY inverters are in summer. I assume this is active cooling, as we were there early afternoon in June. If you think your home inverter for your panels never makes a noise, thats likely because its a 4kw one, and 100kw ones have way more juice flowing through them. I think I could hear the inverters from about 15 feet away.
Broadly things were ok, I was VERY happy to see how clean the panels are, 8 months into energization and probably a year into mounting, so this bodes well for minimal cleaning costs. How grubby panels get really depends on circumstances. This is a livestock field, so crop dust is not constantly blowing near them, which probably helps. I did encounter a bunch of things that I had to complain to the construction company about. I guess its just like having builders come work on your house, but 100x bigger in scale. I really hate that side of the project, but it comes with the territory. It was also good to meet up with the landowner, who is a great guy, very understanding, and a great ‘man on the ground’ who can tell me about any problems directly without it being filtered through a third party.
One of the main reasons I wanted to take a look again was to try and get better drone pictures, as last time the site was not 100% finished and my drone had software issues (DJI apps suck!). This time it worked, and I took some, as you see, but it was pretty windy. Being on a hilltop does not help, and I braved the ‘LAND DRONE IMMEDIATELY’ warnings as long as I could, but they are obviously not pro level snaps :D. I also found one broken panel, from when the site suffered storm damage, which shouldn’t be left there really. It was interesting to see a folded and broken solar panel though. You don’t see many of those.
Overall I’m happy, the site is generating nicely in summer. the end of this month will be when I can do a proper financial analysis, as the output mirrors around midsummer so 6 months data gives me a great yearly prediction. I really want it to break even!