One of the UK’s first commercial wind farms was Coal Clough. It was constructed in 1992 and is capable of generating up to ten megawatts. The farm generated more than 400,000MWh of electricity during its 21-year operational lifetime. Its importance lies in the fact that it has produced enough power to meet the demands of around 5,000 homes per year since 1992. On the 21st December 2009, Scottish Power Renewables submitted an application to repower Coal Clough Windfarm. The application was consented to in January 2013. The plan was to replace the existing 24 turbines and to add eight additional ones in order to increase the generating capacity.
In the past 18 months, Scottish Power Renewables has invested around £22.5 million into this project, increasing the generating capacity of the wind farm from 9.6MW to 16MW.
The repowered Coal Clough wind farm has now officially been opened by Scottish Power Renewables. As it stands, it should be able to meet the electricity demands of over 8,500 homes per year.
Although the Coal Clough wind farm is the “news of the week”, there is more good news in the field of green energy. The UK managed to jump to third place in the world for utilityscale solar in the first quarter of 2015. Right now, we have 408 utility-scale projects, with a total capacity of more than 3.6GW.
“The UK has an extremely competitive groundmount solar market and we are delighted to be amongst those at the forefront – we installed more than 300MW in March alone. I still believe there is huge untapped potential,” Chief Executive Nick Boyle said.
With wind and solar at our backs, the UK is on a steady roll towards its 2020 Renewable Electricity Target.
