Moorhouse Farm Solar Park is a 1.83 MW ground mounted solar array on land adjacent to Moorhouse Farm, Hallen, Bristol, sandwiched between the M5 and M49 motorways.
The total investment required was just over £2million which was raised through a community share offer in summer 2014.
The projected annual output is 1,750 MWh – enough to supply the annual electricity demand for 500 houses with an estimated saving of 850 tonnes of CO2 per year.
Low Carbon Gordano (LCG) owns the Moorhouse installation and has a 25-year lease agreement with the landowner. LCG will receive payments under the Feed In Tariff (FIT) scheme and income from the export of electricity to the National Grid.
The project is being managed in partnership with Bright Renewables. The directors of both companies have a track record in energy generation, successful business management and community involvement.
An opportunity for biodiversity
The sun shone on Saturday 9 May 2015 as George Ferguson, the Mayor of Bristol, formally launched Low Carbon Gordano’s first solar project at Moorhouse Lane in front of 150 members and guests.
Solar farms provide excellent opportunities for enhancing biodiversity. LCG has partnered with Wild Service, the wildlife consultancy for the Avon Wildlife Trust, to manage the habitats at Moorhouse Lane.
Prior to the development of the Solar Array at Moorhouse Lane the site was composed of four fields of improved grassland with a network of hedgerows, rhines and ditches.
The southeastern field was classified as a SNCI and included areas of vegetation representative of marshy grassland.
The act of constructing the solar array caused sufficient disturbance to the grassland sward and soil to allow a slightly more diverse sward to develop. There has been an increase in damp grassland species such as hairy sedge (Carex hirta), false fox sedge (Carex otrubae) and meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria).
Through on-going management and monitoring work the ecological resource provided by the site will continue to increase with the development of a mosaic of species-rich damp grassland and tussock forming grassland areas set within a sensitively managed network of hedgerows and ditches.
This habitat mosaic will support a wider range of plants and create an array of niches and micro habitats which will in turn increase the biodiversity value of the site.
Moorhouse Performance
By the end of October 2020 the Moorhouse solar array had generated 10,212 MWh of electricity since it started operating in April 2015.
This is 4% above predicted despite dull months in February, March, September, and October 2017, a 5 day panel outage in June 2018 and a dull June in 2019. The drop in performance during early 2019 was due to unavoidable works by Western Power Distribution which necessitated the relocation of some of the panels, resulting in reduced performance over that time. This loss was estimated to be around 80MWh which, for comparison, would have resulted in a further 1% improvement in performance above forecast.