Scottish Water has completed work on a £1.4m solar project at a site in Inverness, which will help power essential waste water services in the area with renewable energy.
The project has seen almost 1500 solar panels installed on the ground and roof of the waste water pumping station on Longman Drive, which helps transport waste water from thousands of customers in Inverness to Allanfearn where it is treated and returned to the water environment.
The panels are expected to generate around 0.74GWh of green energy a year, enough to boil around 3.3 million kettles and will save 101 tonnes of carbon – roughly the same as 450 flights from Inverness to London.
Around a quarter of the site’s power needs will now be met by renewable energy, with a proportion of the energy generated also being sold back to the national grid.
The project has been led by Scottish Water Horizons, the public utility’s commercial subsidiary, and delivered by renewables specialists Absolute Solar & Wind.
Scottish Water Horizons Project Manager Tom Clayton said:
“We are delighted to have completed work on this major solar project in Inverness which will see a substantial proportion of the energy needed to operate this site now met by renewable power.
“In the past three years we have installed 14.4GWh of solar energy across Scottish Water sites, compared to 9.6GWh in the previous 12 which underlines our commitment to ramping up the pace and scale of our renewables programme as we respond to the climate crisis and focus on meeting our net zero targets by 2040.”
Scottish Water Operations Team Leader for the area, Gary Henderson, added:
“This pumping station helps transfer the waste water from around 90,000 customers in Inverness and the surrounding area to be treated at our site at Allanfearn, making it a huge consumer of energy.
“It is great that almost a quarter of the energy it uses will now come from solar power, and that the scheme will also see some renewable energy being sold back to the national grid that can be accessed in the local area.”
