Our era arm Octopus Vitality Era is one in all Europe’s largest buyers in solar energy. We glance after 300 UK renewables websites round Europe, half throughout England, Scotland and Wales, many on farmland.
We’re true believers that renewable energy can coexist comfortably with grazing animals, crops and areas of magnificence — powering our world cleanly whereas maintaining native environments pleased and wholesome too.
Final week we discovered one in all our photo voltaic websites wasn’t taken care of in a means in step with our normal cautious environmental requirements. Although this occurred at only one out of the 300 websites we handle, it isn’t acceptable, and we visited the location over the financial institution vacation weekend to begin to treatment the scenario.
As one of many UK’s largest operators of renewable era, we have a duty to ensure our websites are working safely and successfully. That is a authorized obligation, in addition to an ethical one: and a part of it includes often discovering native agricultural contractors to weed round our photo voltaic panels to ensure crops aren’t rising so excessive as to shade the panels or intrude with {the electrical} gear on website, Final week, we found {that a} contractor that we selected made a mistake whereas managing one in all our photo voltaic websites, Hill Finish Farm.
We briefed them to make use of a very exact spraying technique to be sure that the weedkiller was solely utilized the place it completely needed to be, limiting any impression on the photo voltaic farm’s wildflower inhabitants. Sadly, our directions weren’t adopted, and a wider space was sprayed by mistake which resulted in some wildflowers needlessly dying.
We’re actually sorry about this as we’re actually pleased with our strategy to encouraging biodiversity the place our generators and photo voltaic panels are. It isn’t at all times simple, as photo voltaic farms are sure by numerous laws (akin to needing to manage weeds, and returning the land after use to how we discovered it), however we’ve written about what we do at size earlier than on our weblog: “Making inexperienced vitality greener”. As quickly as we discovered we’d truly inadvertently broken a number of the native flora, we sprung into motion.
Over the financial institution vacation weekend, two individuals from OE Era (together with one in all our Administrators) visited Hill Finish Farm to check out the injury. We introduced a wildflower knowledgeable alongside too to advise on how we may restore the injury to the native flora. Now, we’re working with the landowner and native specialists to make issues proper at Hill Finish Farm – nurturing the impacted space, with reseeding the place applicable to make sure years of flourishing meadow sooner or later, and we’re eager to debate with the landowner on how we are able to go even additional.
To verify this by no means occurs once more at any of our websites, we’ve additionally instantly created a specialist staff to supervise the impression of all our era websites and make sure the effectiveness of all our on-site biodiversity initiatives too. As a part of this, any third get together suppliers we use to handle our websites (for instance land brokers, or agricultural contractors) will solely be part of a undertaking after making a proper dedication that the land should stay nurtured and maintained to its unique use – that means it stays as nature supposed, bar any minimal weeding required to ensure the photo voltaic panels function safely and successfully.
What occurred at Hill Finish Farm may sadly have occurred with any administration of agricultural land, the place errors with herbicides aren’t unusual – however my staff have sprung into motion this weekend as a result of I am lethal critical concerning the the impression I need our mills to have. I need to provide my honest and heartfelt apology that we destroyed this biodiverse meadow, and I need to prolong a promise: sooner or later, we’ll take much more care to make sure that the instruments powering our world on Zero Carbon energy are doing so with full and whole respect for native environments.
