£600,000k capital injection for English wind turbine company

England's largest installer of small wind turbines has secured £540,000 in investment and will receive a further £60,000 of funding as it prepares to expand its operations across the UK.


Windcrop, based in Norfolk, provides customers such as farmers, homeowners, community groups and schools with an opportunity to generate renewable energy with no cost to the landowner.

Each turbine installed, which earns revenue for Windcrop through the feed-in-tariff scheme, will typically generate 8,000-10,000kWh a year.

The company has 350 turbines installed across the east of the country and a further 280 applications at a planning stage. It hopes the funding will enable it to expand operations into Scotland, Wales and the south east.

By 2016 Windcrop forecasts it will generate 58.3MWs of renewable energy, offsetting 110 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

The 5kW turbines are 15m high and provide electricity at the point of use, which the company claims will have minimal impact on the landscape, and make planning approval easier to maintain.

To install the turbines, which can cut electricity by £500 a year, customers need to have enough land and a minimum wind speed of around 5.2m a second.

Windcrop managing director John Moore said: “Our customers can make the decision to adopt renewable energy without having to deploy any of their own time and resource to the organisation or planning.

“Our in-house experts take on all the hard work of assessing the suitability of the sites and negotiating planning. We then carry out the entire installation and maintain the turbine for the length of the contract.”

Conor McGlone

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