Aura Power are working on a solar farm proposal on land to the west of Grimsby with a capacity of up to 49.9MW (Megawatts). The solar farm will be built without subsidy and could generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of up to 27,200 homes, saving around 25,100 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere each year.
With North East Lincolnshire at the heart of the Green Energy Revolution, Grimsby Solar Farm will not only increase the supply of clean power, it will help to reduce national power prices whilst decarbonising the economy. As a local business, our solar farm will also be contributing over £100,000 in business rates to North East Lincolnshire council every year.
We are also offering a Community Benefit Fund of £350 per MW per year (index-linked), for the lifetime of the solar farm. This could amount to £17,500 a year for 35 years or over £600,000 in total used locally for social and environmental projects. £2,000 a year would be set aside for educational sessions with local schools and site visits to the solar farm.
We recently submitted a planning application to North East Lincolnshire Council. You can view the full application and share your comments with the council by clicking here.
On the 16th February we held a Pre-Planning Public Consultation Webinar and Q&A session event where we outlined the proposal and answered questions from the local community.
Design Finalised and Planning Application Submitted. We will consider all community feedback from the Public Consultation before finalising the design, ready for submission.
The Planning Decision is expected within 13 weeks of the date of submission.
Once Planning Permission is granted we will begin construction. Construction is expected to take around 12 – 16 weeks.
Listening to the views of the local community is very important to us and we strongly value your feedback. Due to current lockdown measures, we held our public consultation event via a Zoom webinar online on Tuesday 16th February at 6pm. Here, the local community were able to ask any questions live to our project team. The webinar was recorded and now available to view below along with the slides of the presentation.
This webinar was presented to the local community and interested parties regarding Grimsby Solar Farm. The presentation was delivered by Aura Power and followed by a Q&A session. Viewers are invited to submit their questions to chloe.hood@aurapower.co.uk
We have been undertaking a number of environmental and visual surveys to help shape our design. We understand that solar farms represent a change to the landscape and our proposal aims to reduce the impact as far as possible. Our proposal offers a number of ecological and local benefits as well as a continued agricultural use with sheep being able to graze beneath the panels.
Our aim is to locate the solar farm appropriately and as sensitively as possible to the surroundings. This site has been selected for a number of reasons which include but are not limited to:
• Nearby grid connection with sufficient capacity
• The site can be screened largely with existing trees and hedgerows, and where views are possible, new vegetation is proposed to mitigate this
• Good access and the land is relatively flat
• The site is not covered by any landscape designations
• There are good levels of solar irradiation in this part of England
• Two wind turbines and large overhead powerlines already on site
The below simulations show the projected views before and after the solar farm has been built and the proposed planting has grown to around 4m in height.
Your feedback is very important to us. Please leave a comment and one of our project team will get back to you as soon as possible.