Solarcentury About To Complete 70 MW Worth Of Solar Power Projects

March 17th, 2013 by Zach

The UK’s Solarcentury is about to complete construction of 70 megawatts (MW) of solar power projects, 38 MW of which have been completed in the past 6 months. The entire 70 MW are scheduled for completion by the end of this month (March 2013).

“To date, the company has built 12 utility-scale solar parks and is still keen to maintain operating as a contractor,” the company noted in a press release about all this.

“After the 70 MWp is completed, we aim to keep up the pace with an additional 100MWp this year,” said Solarcentury CEO Frans van den Heuvel.

This is all just to point out that, while the UK went through a turbulent year of premature feed-in tariff cuts last year, solar power is still growing strong there. I’m sure there are many other solar developers who have a similar story to tell.

Solarcentury, formed in 1998, is a clear solar leader in the UK. Most of the projects mentioned above are utility-scale projects.

Overall, Trina Solar has postulated that the UK could double its solar power capacity in 2013, adding another 2 gigawatts (GW) or so of solar power.

“Applications until the official deadline on January 15 indicate a total of between 800MW and 1GW to be installed across solar farm sites during the first quarter as people look to benefit from the peak Renewable Obligation Certificate level before it is lowered on 1 April,” sales director Richard Rushin recently said. “But we also expect the reduced rate of 1.6 for ground-based arrays will enable expansion of the large-scale segment to continue through the rest of the year.”

Going on: “What the industry has managed to achieve in the UK is a sustainable model for future growth. We are now very well placed to achieve the 20Gw of total installed solar PV capacity that DECC has indicated is technically feasible by 2020.”

Have a UK solar project pipeline or project worth boasting about? Drop us a note in the comments! (Heck, for that matter, drop us a not about such big news anywhere in the world.)

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Tags: Solarcentury, UK, UK 2013, UK Solar 2013

About the Author

Zach is the director of CleanTechnica, the most popular cleantech-focused website in the world, and Planetsave, a world-leading green and science news site. He has been covering green news of various sorts since 2008, and he has been especially focused on solar energy, electric vehicles, and wind energy since 2009. Aside from his work on CleanTechnica and Planetsave, he's the founder and director of Solar Love, EV Obsession, and Bikocity. To connect with Zach on some of your favorite social networks, go to ZacharyShahan.com and click on the relevant buttons.