We ran a tour to visit two local renewable energy projects near Ivybridge on Friday 20th October 2018.

• 10am - We visited the two privately owned wind turbines at New England Quarry.
• 11.30am - Portworthy Solar Array near Lee Moor. The 4.3MW array generates enough electricity for 1300 homes and is community-owned by Bath & West Community Energy (BWCE). In June this year we were able to award £5,000 in grants to local initiatives, from the income generated by the sale of solar electricity.

We had a very interesting visit to the two privately owned wind turbines at New England Quarry. Both are 65kW Tozzi Nord turbines, they are 33m tall, the blades are 11m long. Noise levels from the turbines have been measured as 36 decibels at 300m distance (equivalent to a loud whisper). The turbines sit on a base of 53m3 of concrete reinforced with 9 tonnes of steel, but the bases are only 1.5m deep. They stand on protected grassland, so whenever they need maintenance, vehicles have to drive over protective boarding, and they are too high to have any impact on the local bat population.
​
Neil had hoped to build a solar farm in the neighbouring field, but the cost to connect to the grid was too high, so instead they have brought in new top soil and will be planting 50,00 trees!

​The Portworthy Solar Array was commissioned at the end of November 2015. It is owned by BWCE, so all surplus income from the sale of the electricity is invested into a Community Fund which BWCE have asked us to administer (because we are a bit more local than them!). In June 2017 we awarded grants totalling nearly £5000 to local groups.

The site has a total installed capacity of 4.024MW – made up of 15,780 panels, connected to 128 inverters. Since the site was installed in 2015, it has generated a total of 2.77GWh of energy, which is enough to energy to power almost 900 households for one year (based on TDCVs).

If you are interested in visiting local renewable energy schemes please get in touch with us.