Glastonbury: the festival of light

Situated on the Glastonbury festival farmland, Britain’s largest privately owned solar power plant is now fully operational. Conventionally home to residents of the furry variety, the 1,500m² cowshed roof will now feature a huge array of over 1,000 solar panels.

Solarsense UK, specialist in agricultural and industrial photovoltaic installations in the south west, has now competed the 200kW plant, featuring 1,116 Romag PV modules and two Sputnik Engineering SolarMax TS series central inverters, which were purchased from Sundog Energy, one of the leading British companies for renewable energy systems. The system is expected to yield 160.704kWh a year, enough to supply 40 households with energy and eliminate 100 tons of CO₂ emissions every year.

“Our portfolio perfectly matches the individual segments of the important British photovoltaic market. That is why we are so pleased that this impressive project has also been fitted with SolarMax inverters,“ said Daniel Freudiger, General Manager of Sputnik Engineering International and Head of Sales & Marketing at the company's Swiss headquarters in Biel.

“We decided in favour of Sputnik Engineering for our inverters because of their high quality,” explains Kerry Burns, General Manager of the company which operates the system, Solarsense UK. “Besides, the price/performance ratio of the devices and the plant monitoring convinced us as well.“ Solarsense installed the internet-based data logger MaxWeb xp which warns Burns and his employees by SMS in case of an error.

The solar plant is our figurehead,“ said Michael Eavis, the owner of the Worthy Farm and initiator of the Glastonbury Festival. “This has brought us one big step closer to our goal of operating the farm as ecologically as possible.”

Glastonbury is Europe’s largest open-air music festival, attended by roughly 200,000 guests from all over the world, and is held on Worthy Farm, in southern England.

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