A solar farm and battery storage facility will soon be powering Exeter’s electric fleet of vehicles and recycling centre.
The Water Lane Solar Park at Marsh Barton features 3,700 solar panels which will create more than 1MW of clean energy.
Funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the facility, built on an inactive landfill site, includes a substantial battery storage capacity to provide flexibility between peak generation and peak usage.
It will feed the power generated directly into the council’s recycling centre, as well as charging the council’s electric fleet, including its three electric refuse vehicles.
Energy generation and storage
Cllr Duncan Wood, Lead Councillor for Climate Change, said the ability to generate green energy at a time of rapidly rising fuel costs was hugely important for the city.
He said: “This is an amazing site – it’s not just generating green energy but using new storage technology to meet the needs of our fleet and powering the recycling processes at the Material Reclamation Facility. We will be able guarantee that our electric vehicles going around Exeter are running on green electricity.
“That’s really important to us. It’s something we started creating quite a few years ago. We have been using solar panels across our buildings, like the huge array at the Matford Livestock Centre.
“Here we’ve got 3,700 solar panels 1MW battery storage, and that’s important because we need to keep the power supply to charge our vehicles and to run the recycling centre. That needs to be constant so we need the battery back-up.
“When it’s not that sunny the panels are still charging, but obviously the consistency of supply to charge up those large refuse trucks is important. We have also got a lot of electric vans and cars that the Council runs, and we want to ensure that they are charged on green energy.”
