Powering Tomorrow: Asset Management

At Low Carbon, we ensure that every project maximises the delivery of clean energy. Whether sites are our own, or managed on behalf of third parties, we apply our proven experience to operational and financial performance.

Our Asset Manager, Louise Penton, shares how Low Carbon keeps solar sites performing at their best - from monitoring energy output and managing maintenance to ensuring compliance and protecting long-term value. Louise shows how careful oversight and proactive management safeguard our investments and keep our assets powering a more sustainable future.

Full Transcript:

My name is Louise Penton, and I've been an Asset Manager here at Low Carbon for about three years. And at the moment we're at Hope Solar Farm down in Cornwall. This is what we call a first generation site. So it's one of the early days of the solar industry. It came online in January 2014. So it's just over ten years old now.

It's a seven megawatt site, and on here we've got roughly 27,000 panels, and then we've got six inverters, and then those are connected to three transformers and then those transformers feed it off to the grid. Farming and solar worked really well together before we installed the solar panels on the site. There was and this was a pasture land.

So once the panels are installed and up and running, we're able to reintroduce any livestock or mostly sheep. The sheep seem really happy here. They're able to sit underneath the panels and get shade from the sun that we have here today. But in terms of harmony, it's actually a really happy partnership. We found at some of the sites that we've had that are about ten years old now, where the soil was really heavily used in the past, just turning it to pasture land and just letting it sort of breathe and relax. The quality of the soil is increased. It's a really positive story that we're seeing across the portfolio at multiple different sites, and that's something that we're really proud of. So we don't tend to use any pesticides or negative chemicals on the land. It's just left.

So we have bees here and a hive community installed on this solar farm. They work really well together because it's quite quiet and shaded and protected. So the bees feel comfortable in this area. There's not a lot of humans that come around here, and the sheep and the bees get along quite nicely.

The benefits for farmers for having a solar farm on their lands is that they get an enhanced income. It's quite constant and it just provides that extra lift for the farmers, where money might come in handy for refurbishment works on the farm, buying your equipment for other bits so they can do the projects that perhaps they might not have had the opportunity to do before.

We do get a lot of positive feedback and we have a lot of engagement from the farming community, so we all need is there and it's real and we need to solve that conundrum that we have at the moment. So using land farmland for solar panels is helping to make us have the extra energy that we need for all the electrical equipment that we have at home now. Plus also make us some energy sufficient so that we don't need to import so much of it.