Recycling company Viridor invests in solar energy at Great Blakenham

Leading UK recycling and renewable energy company Viridor has completed the installation of a roof mounted solar Photo-Voltaic deployment on to six of its operational sites across the country, including here in Suffolk.

The waste sorting and recycling centre at Great Blakenham now has an array of 150KW panels which generate electricity for use by the team on site, which is near Ipswich.

A total of 841 KW panels have been installed across sites in the South West and South East of England, with the largest being located in Priorswood, Taunton.

The respective arrays have been tailored to optimise the power generation capability at each of the facilities and marrying it to the parasitic energy use on site. This maximises the benefits of each installation reducing the requirement to rely on the National Grid supplies.

This latest solar project follows on from the pioneering Westbury solar park in Wiltshire where the company used recycled railway sleepers to mount solar PV panels on top of a restored landfill site and the award winning installation of roof mounted panels at the Lakeside Energy Recovery Facility near Heathrow.

Viridor is continuing to develop its renewable energy division with the creation of a network of energy reservoirs, maximising the company’s existing energy generation capacity by allying this with state-of-the-art technologies and innovative research projects.

Chris Jonas, director of Business Development for Viridor said: “At Viridor we are looking to maximise the potential energy generation capacity in our asset base.

“Over the last year we have looked to harness renewable energy generation techniques to develop a network of decentralised energy hubs for use by the Viridor operations themselves and also to provide renewable energy directly into the National Grid.”

Suzanna Lashford, head of UK Commercial Sales at Solarcentury added: “In 2014, we completed a ground mount site at MW scale for Viridor, so we’re pleased that the company has invested further in solar, in this case, using a self-consumption business model which means Viridor maximisesits ROI.

“The range of designs Solarcentury created for these systems demonstrates solar’s fantastic flexibility, and together with the speed of deployment is what makes solar such a straightforward clean energy solution. Self-consumption makes financial sense too, even as the UK market moves away from subsidies.”

Viridor’s purpose is to give resources new life, transforming ‘waste’ into high quality recyclables, raw materials and energy.

Each year Viridor transforms over 1.5 million tonnes of materials into high quality recyclate, and yet more into over 930 gigawatt hours of renewable energy. In total it safely manages over seven million tonnes of recyclables and waste materials for customers from all sectors across the UK.