Glastonbury revellers use energy from largest PV array
Worthy Farm’s huge PV array is thought to be the biggest in the country and it came into good use over the weekend for Glastonbury, the world’s biggest music festival.
With 177,000 fewer people on Worthy Farm in Somerset, life is slowly getting back to normal for Glastonbury this week.
It’ll take around a month for the site to return to normal grazing pastures, with a huge clean-up operation in full swing. A total of 139,000 people attended the Festival as ticket holders – a further 38,000 performers, support staff and security personnel were also on site.
In November, Michael Eavis, who owns Worthy Farm, installed an array of 1,116 PV panels on the roof of a cowshed he calls the Mootel. It’s thought to be the largest private solar electric array in Great Britain, able to power the equivalent of 40 homes.
Weighing 20 tonnes, the electricity generated provides power for the farm, with surplus feeding into the National Grid, but over the last week it has been put to the test for the first time. Demand peaked at around 15MW.
Speaking about the PV shortly after installation, Eavis said, “We had to make a big statement – and this is what we’ve done.”
In previous years, the festival has required 200 diesel-powered generators.
The new array produces up to 200kW, which over a year saves around 87 tonnes of carbon and generates enough electricity to power the enormous Pyramid Stage for a whole week.
Eavis hopes that other landowners will follow in his footsteps in installing solar arrays and Somerset planning officers are being urged to make it easier to receive the necessary permissions to install PV arrays of all sizes.
The Glastonbury array, installed by Solar Sense (www.solarsense-uk.com) can earn the farm £60k in FITs. ROI is expected before 2020.
After March 2012, any new microgeneration units will receive a lower FIT than the entitlement for earlier installations.
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