Our biggest solar project yet!

Across our holiday parks, we have been introducing solar panels for many years now and in our efforts to work towards achieving net zero carbon status, our new project at Highlands End Holiday Park will make a substantial contribution.

We already have solar across all of the suitable park buildings at Highlands End, as well as our lodge holiday homes for hire. The new project that recently received planning permission, is a ground-mounted installation of panels on adjoining land between the holiday park and the village of Eype.

This system will consist of 300 panels on 15 galvanised steel framework tables and has a capacity of 198kWp. This scheme is expected to generate around 225,000 kWh of electricity per year, which would cover the approximate annual usage of 60 average homes.

This will make a big dent into the electricity use of the park and the clean energy will be used to power Highlands End Leisure Club, the holiday accommodation/pitches and the EV charging points, with excess exported to the grid.

This project will allow additional car charging points to be provided on-park and the project has a lifespan of 35 years, after which time can be removed and recycled. The scheme will be installed by Solar South West and Goodfellows, both local businesses.

We considered all of the adjoining park-owned land and this field had the smallest visual impact upon the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). The field is currently low-grade agricultural land used for sheep grazing and the installation allows space underneath for sheep to continue to graze.

The installation is not visible from many areas on the park and this will be mitigated in 2 ways, with an apple orchard planted around the scheme to both act as screening and to increase biodiversity and wildlife habitats and also new hedging planted along 2 footpaths from the park, to reduce the visual impact.

The scheme will provide an estimated annual CO2 saving of approximately 47,000kg annually. We will continue looking for other ways to improve and as caravans and lodges become available with integrated PV and battery storage, these will be adopted, but those on their own will not allow carbon zero to be achieved.

We are very excited with this new development on the park and to make a significant step towards reaching net zero carbon status. This development will be followed by a similar project at Golden Cap Holiday Park, for which planning permission has also been confirmed.