We continue our look back through our accomplishments and highlights of 2016, continuing with March and April.
March: Another large grain store was cleaned, this time at Hatchpen Farm for the Rand Brothers in Royston, Hertfordshire. With over 2,500 solar panels spread across 3 roofs, again it was cherry pickers, long poles and strong muscles at the ready!
March also saw our most logistically challenging round of cleans for Solarcentury. They required us to clean 104 roof mounted arrays, each between 50KW – 250KW in size, from Carlisle and Newcastle Upon Tyne, working our way all the way down to Helston in Cornwall. We completed this mammoth task in just two weeks and this ranks as one of Clean Solar Solutions best accomplishments to date. A feat we are very proud of.
We also began the cleaning of 5 solar farms across the Midlands for Natural Generation, with over 25MW cleaned in total for them.
We were glad to be contracted by award-winning EvoEnergy to carry out the UK’s first solar car park cleaning at Ken Martin Leisure Centre, in Nottingham. The 88KW array was built across 9 specifically designed roofs and 100% of the energy will be used on site. Evoenergy were so impressed with the results, that we were further contracted to clean another solar car park for them.
We noticed in March that there was a huge uptake for bird proofing across the country, with pigeons nesting under solar panels. This trend has continued since throughout the year and we have bird proofed over 100 properties from Scotland to Kent and Cornwall during 2016.
April: We kicked April off with the cleaning of the 15MW Bilsham solar farm for O&M provider, Cobalt Energy. Solar panel cleaning is built in to the O&M contract for this site due to it’s coastal location and the associated problems that seagull droppings bring to solar arrays.
Another notable project was the cleaning of 2 solar farms for German solar giant SMA. The solar farms are adjacent to Santapod Raceway at Wellingborough and were a total of 34MW. This was completed in just 12 days.
We continued the month by bird proofing around 20 properties in April for Anesco, most of which were on a Local Housing Association project. We also cleaned roof mounted solar panels at Derby University as well as numerous Big Yellow Storage facilities, privatley owned farms and residential properties.
April was concluded with the cleaning of a solar farm for one of the UK’s largest solar farm developers, British Solar Renewables. Westover solar farm is located in Devon and has over 27,000 panels on site.