Nova Innovation and RSK have secured a contract to deliver a floating solar farm for one of the UK’s largest suppliers of high quality industrial sand.
The Scottish clean energy specialists will install a 400kW array consisting of 650 floating solar panels on North Arclid Lake, an artificial lake on the site of Bathgate Silica Sand’s Arclid quarry in Cheshire, where industrial sand has been quarried and processed for over a century.
In June, the UK Government released its long-anticipated solar roadmap, setting out a bold commitment to increase the nation’s solar capacity to 75GW by 2035. Crucially, the roadmap explicitly recognises floating solar as a key technology that could help to meet this target.
Floating solar is set to become a key source of renewable energy with the potential to produce 9,343 terawatt hours (TWh)* globally, equivalent to meeting Europe’s electricity needs three times over.