Twenty Solar Farm Sites Planned For Northern Ireland

If you are planning a peaceful holiday or short break in the beautiful counties of Northern Ireland in the coming years, you may find that you are not alone. Not in the people sense however, but because the UK's biggest developer of solar farms has said it wants to spend £100m developing 20 sites in Northern Ireland over the next two years.

An increasingly familiar sight

Lightsource Renewable Energy Ltd is currently consulting on plans, and specifically has its eyes set on  two large scale farms in County Antrim and one in County Down.  One of the sites is 35 acres of land at Aldergrove near Belfast International Airport.

Also attracting the attention of its beady eyes are sites at Upper Ballinderry, near Lisburn, and Ballyhornan near Downpatrick. The company has said it could generate enough power for more than 1,000 homes. The London-based company is a market leader, having developed about 75 solar farms to date.

Its development director Conor McGuigan is from Belfast. He said there it was felt that there was a lot of potential for utility-scale solar farms in Northern Ireland. "If it works domestically, then you can generally make it work commercially," he said.  "What we have found here (in Northern Ireland) is that it is akin to somewhere like the Midlands and we have been deploying farms there for the last year and half."

Once a suitable site is acquired, the development takes the form of rows of solar panels  erected on staging. The company stresses that no concrete foundations are required and the whole installation can be removed at a future date. Lightsource Renewable Energy commits to the site for 25 years.

David McClenaghan lives across the road from the proposed Aldergrove site and has concerns about a solar farm arriving on his doorstep. "Car parking facilities are slowly spreading away from the airport, businesses are coming in, hauliers are obviously needed for the airport and I don't particularly want to be living in the middle of an industrial area and to me this could start that off," he said.

The company is funded by private investors who will get a return from green government subsidies which are guaranteed for 20 years. Conor McGuigan said solar power is a safe option for investors. "We work within a fund called Octopus Investments - they stand behind us - these are not fat cats, they are small investors," Mr McGuigan said.  "So what we do is deploy that money in a safe, predictable and very conservative way. Solar is very predictable, it's not sexy in terms of returns, but that works"

In England there has been a bit of a solar rush, with counties such as Dorset, Devon and Cornwall all having seen a rise in applications for ever bigger installations. Some environmental campaigners have expressed their worries about turning agricultural land over to generating power. It is a concern shared by David McClenaghan.

"There's other land, old airfields etc near at hand, that could be used for this sort of development but to use good green ground, to me just wouldn't be right," he said.

Lightsource Renewable Energy point out that the land can continue to be used for grazing and in areas where the solar farms are given over to nature they have greatly enhanced biodiversity.

The company also said that meeting UK government targets of 22GW of electricity from solar over the next 15 years would only require use of about 0.3% of all agricultural land. The Northern Ireland Executive wants 40% of Northern Ireland’s energy to come from alternative sources by 2020.

                                       More information about Lightsource Renewable Energy