The Science Museum in London currently utilises solar panels to provide an amount of electricity to their building in South Kensington. However, the museum also has a huge storage facility at what used to be an RAF airfield where they would also like to install solar panels.
Science Museum, South Kensington, London
(image credit: Ewan-M)
The Science Museum have 220,000 museum pieces but only about 8 per cent of these pieces are on display at the museum in South Kensington at any one time. The rest are stored at the disused airfield near Wroughton, Swindon.
Although still in the pre-planning stage, the Science Museum has entered into a partnership with Swindon Commercial Services that is owned by the local authority with a view to installing as many as 160,000 solar panels at the disused airfield. If planning approval is obtained, the project could be up and running by the end of 2013 and generating 40MW of power.
It is claimed that the proposed scheme would be the biggest such project in the United Kingdom costing in the region of £50 million and being capable of providing sufficient electricity to supply 12,000 houses.
The Science Museum should be complimented on the fact that they have been able to knock 17 per cent off its carbon footprint.
This is yet another of the many solar panel farm projects that we have mentioned in previous posts on our site that have either been built or are awaiting a decision from the planning authorities with no doubt many more to come. Only this week Greg Barker the Climate Change Minister for the coalition government had commented on how well placed the solar panel industry was to grow so that, by 2020, the country could achieve 20 GW of capacity. If this were achieved it would be an increase of more than 10 times the capacity we are presently seeing. We will continue to monitor any developments.
