A FARMER is hoping for a bright future as the largest solar farm in the country goes live.

Last Wednesday saw the first kilowatts of electricity generated at Westmill Farm, in Watchfield, and the farm is already putting almost 20,000 kilowatt hours per day of renewable electricity into the local grid.

The five megawatt solar farm, which covers 30 acres and has more than 22,000 photovoltaic panels, is owned and has been built by Blue Energy and developed by Low Carbon Solar, a renewable energy developer from Cirencester.

It is next to the five wind turbines at Westmill farm, making it unique in the UK as an energy park with two commercial scale renewable technologies operating side by side.

The panels are expected to generate about 4.7 gigawatts of electricity a year, equivalent to the average annual electricity consumption of 1,000 people.

The construction of the £12m farm has taken only two months as contractors worked against the clock to ensure that it was fully operational before August 1, when the Government changes to the Feed in Tariff legislation takes effect.

Adam Twine, farmer at Westmill and one of the driving forces behind the project, said: “Obviously it is great to get it up and running.

“It was much quicker than it was to set up the wind farm: from conception to completion it has taken just under a year.

“Planning was pretty straight forward but the biggest challenge came from sorting out the finance.

“It was a logical development with the amount of land I had and when it became commercially possible I went to Germany to see a similar scheme, where they had turned an old Russian airfield into a large farm.

“I had a concern about the size of the farm being 30 acres. It is a big site but during the community consultation, where a couple of hundred people came along, in the forms they filled out about 98 per cent said to go for the biggest site.

“I think with the wind farm quite a lot of people were anxious about it but it can’t really be seen so a lot of people have been supportive.”

The recently formed Westmill Solar Co-operative will launch a share offer to enable local people to buy shares in the solar farm, and it is hoped that by the end of the year it will owned by the community.

“Local ownership of a solar farm in the UK on this scale will be a first and I expect we will be oversubscribed for the share offer as we were for the wind farm,” said Adam.

“I am fairly serious when it comes to climate change. There needs to be a change in our behaviour but we do use a lot of electricity so if we can bring more renewable energy onto the grid then that will be a step in the right direction.

“The community ownership of the farm is the thing I am most excited about.

“I really hope that this model of local people taking positive action to address climate change and take ownership of projects such as these will grow and grow quickly.”

More information about the upcoming share offer can be found at www.westmillsolar.coop.