Positech Energy was formed in March 2021 as a UK limited company aiming to develop solar energy in the UK. The company is owned and run by Cliff Harris, a long-time environmentalist who also created and runs Positech Games, an independent video game developer based in the southwest of England.
Positech Energy's first development is a 1.2MWp solar farm with battery storage in Shropshire, UK. The site consists of 3,024 410W solar panels manufactured by South Korean company Q-Cells, 10 Solis inverters, and a grid connection of 900kWp. Planning permission was granted in October 2022, and the site is currently live and generating!
Solar has many advantages for a company like ours. Planning permission in the UK is easier for solar farms than wind farms, and the economics enable small-scale solar, whereas tidal, wind, and geothermal all require huge investment and can be uneconomic at the level we wish to operate. Solar is also largely maintenance-free and, as of 2023, entirely subsidy-free in the UK. It also operates in a truly free market, unlike government-backed and subsidized energy such as nuclear power.
Project Milestones
The first rows of posts for the mounting frames for our site in Shropshire.
Pile driving in progress.
Access road created for construction and maintenance traffic. It's a nice bit of countryside!
Full frames built, ready for panels!
Our field is not flat! The panels are split into short runs to accommodate this.
At last, the inverters are on site ready to be fitted. These are big chunk 80-110kW Solis inverters.
All the panels are now on site. There are 3,024 of them in total, and it’s hard to convey how many that is in a mere picture of pallets!
The quickest and easiest way to move a lot of panels at a time in a potentially muddy field.
Me standing between the first few rows of fitted, but not connected, panels, trying to convince myself this is all going as expected.
Lifting the substation containing the transformer into place on-site.
Most of the panels installed, awaiting removal of overhead power line.
Me celebrating that a lot of the work is now done!
The big chunk cabling being buried underground instead of running over the center of the farm.
This seemingly trivial little cable delayed the entire site connection and energization for at least a year and involved hundreds of emails to get moved.
It was a nice sunny day when the DNO came to move the overhead line and connect the site to the grid at long last.
A very relieved me, standing between two rows of panels, waiting for the final connection to be switched on.
There was a very tight deadline, ridiculously after a literal year of delays, so work prior to energization had to start at sunrise.
The very first time there was evidence that one of our inverters was now connected to the grid, after almost 4 years trying to make it happen...
Our site in Shropshire is on a sheep farm that will continue to have access to the land throughout the lifetime of the farm, as sheep can happily graze between the rows of panels. This keeps the land in use for agriculture and provides a convenient way to keep the grass level down and prevent it interfering with the panels.
Blog Updates
Positech's director Cliff Harris blogs about the development of the solar farm, including lots of details about the process involved in getting a solar farm built in the UK. Here are some notable posts: