THE CURRENT sunny weather could help turnaround the fortune’s of a council’s “underperforming” solar farm, it is hoped.
The ground mounted solar panels, at the Oak Grove solar farm in Crick, near Caerwent, were expected to generate £402,000 in income, after operating and borrowing costs, during the most recent six month period.
But bad weather along with grid outages at the site, and the need to replace inverters that resulted in downtime which meant the farm wasn’t producing electricity, have been blamed for a not so bright financial performance.
Monmouthshire County Council’s cabinet member for finance Ben Callard told members of a scrutiny committee, meeting at County Hall, in Usk, amid a run of warm sunny days, on Tuesday, April 29: “If this weather continues I’m sure we’ll get good output from those panels.”
The Labour member for Llanfoist and Govilon described the farm, which the council developed with £4.5 million of repayable investment funding from the Welsh Government in 2017, as “underperforming”.
The farm is now forecast to generate a net income of £285,916, after costs, which is of £116,084 short of the £402,000 the council had expected to bank.
A report for the committee however said it is anticipated performance will improve through the current financial year with a forecasted gross income of £751,286.
Since 2017, the solar farm has generated a gross income for the council of just over £5.1m and a “return on investment” of approximately five per cent.
The latest figures show performance of the solar farm has improved slightly since October when the net income was predicted to be £271,000 when poor weather and outages were blamed.
