Solar Panels – Snow Laughing Matter!

As Associated British Ports announces one of the biggest roof top solar installations in the UK, HBPW can reveal the part ‘snow thinking’ played in enabling ABP to become one of Britain’s highest generating corporate solar power producers.

The port giant is installing 20MW of solar arrays across 1.4 million sqm of covered storage space nationwide, one 23,000 sqm scheme covering multiple warehouse roofs at Immingham, Britain’s biggest port.

Associate, Paul Jacklin, said: “Immingham is one of two locations – the other being Goole – which together will deliver 4.5MW capacity when simultaneously live, hopefully by March this year.”

Once complete, the UK-wide investment could see ABP’s 21 ports featuring 100,000 solar panels generating up to 22,400,000kWh of clean electricity each year – enough to boil more than 1.12 billion kettles.

But ‘snow thinking’ was instrumental in setting the ABP eco dream on the road to reality.

“Solar panels, by their nature, are heavy and ABP wanted to be sure their existing buildings at Immingham and Goole were capable of taking the additional weight at roof top level.

“Many structures are designed with bad weather in mind and snow is notorious for adding sudden and unexpected weight to rooftop structures. However, ABP needed to be 100% certain that their Immingham and Goole buildings were capable of taking the additional and more permanent weight, of solar panels.”

A cleaner future. Image courtesy of humberbusiness.com

With that in mind ‘bad weather’ engineering principles, similar to those used to calculate snow weight, were applied to make the necessary load calculations.

“We were able to prove that the steel frame structures were suited to ABP’s ambitions,” added Paul, “helping pave the way for this hugely positive initiative by Associated British Ports.”

Electricity generated will power port operations for ABP and its customers, with excess power fed into the National Grid.

Chris Garton, ABP’s Director of Asset Management, said: “Renewable energy is at the heart of this business. Not only do we play a vital role in the thriving UK offshore wind sector but our business is increasingly a significant renewable energy generator in its own right.

“We are confident that this is just the beginning for ABP. We still have significant potential to further develop our ports to generate yet more clean energy, further reducing the carbon footprint both of our business and of our customers’ operations.”