The panels have been fitted to the roofs of the Bristol-based University’s Centre for Sport and Department of Planning and Agriculture centre at the Frenchay Campus.

The solar panels, installed by renewable energy specialist Solarsense, have been designed to generate about 74,000 kilowatt (kW) hours of clean electricity every year and save almost 39 tonnes of carbon dioxide from being pumped into the atmosphere every year.

The University will benefit from Feed-in Tariff subsidies that will enable UWE to recover the capital investment in less than eight years as well as providing future income to invest in more energy-saving projects.

UWE’s estates operations manager, Phil Kearns, said: “We are using the new solar arrays to demonstrate the effectiveness of solar PV. If it proves as successful as we expect, we will be asking the UWE executive board to invest in more PV arrays.”

The university aims to halve its buildings’ carbon emissions by 2021 from 2001 levels and is currently working on a project to replace conventional lights with low energy LED lamps.

Leigh Stringer

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