From the park · Solar

How Grovelands built its own 1.5MW solar farm

Every office at Grovelands runs on electricity generated in the field beside it. This is where the array came from, who built it, and what it actually means for the businesses renting space here.

Why put a solar farm on a business park?

Two reasons, and the bigger one is the simpler one: we wanted the park to run on genuinely renewable power. Buying a green tariff from a supplier would have been far easier, but it would not have been the same thing. A tariff is an accounting arrangement. An array in the field is electricity that physically exists because the land it sits on made it, feeding the buildings a few hundred yards away.

The second reason was cost. Electricity is one of the few costs on a business park that only ever moves in one direction, and it has moved a long way in the last few years — for us and for every tenant on site. Generating your own is the only real protection against that, and unlike almost every other overhead, it keeps working once it is paid for.

The clearest example of what that buys sits in the car park. There are 20 electric vehicle charging points on site, at 30p per kWh, open to tenants and visitors alike — roughly half what the public network averages on comparable chargers. We can do that because the electricity has not been bought from anybody: it is generated in the field and used a few hundred yards away.

They are 7kW chargers, which suits an office car park perfectly: a car standing still for eight hours charges comfortably over a working day. Park, plug in, forget about it.

The site happened to suit it: open Northamptonshire farmland, plenty of room, and nothing tall enough nearby to put the panels in shade.

The completed 1.5MW solar array at Grovelands Business Park.

Who built it

The array is ground-mounted: rows of panels on steel frames, set out across the field and fenced around the perimeter. Nothing about it is complicated to look at, which rather understates the amount of work that goes in underneath. The bulk of the job on a scheme this size is civil engineering — site preparation and earthworks, foundations for the mounting frames, cable trenching, access tracks strong enough to take delivery vehicles, drainage, and then putting the ground back properly once everything else has gone in.

All of that physical work at Grovelands was carried out by HWBC, a self-delivering civil engineering contractor that works on solar and battery storage sites across the UK. HWBC and Grovelands share the same owner, which is a large part of the reason a business park of this size has a solar farm at all: the expertise and the plant were already in the family, and the field was already there.

Four times what the whole park uses

The finished array is rated at 1.5MW. Across a year it produces roughly four times more electricity than the entire park consumes — every office suite, the shared kitchens and meeting rooms, the lighting, the car park, all of it. Grovelands is therefore a net exporter of clean energy rather than a consumer of it, with the surplus going out to the grid.

That ratio is the part worth holding on to. Plenty of commercial buildings have some panels on the roof and a line about sustainability in the brochure. Generating four times your own demand is a different order of thing, and it is not something most business parks in Northamptonshire can claim.

What it means if you rent an office here

For a lot of tenants it means nothing more than the lights coming on, which is as it should be. But it does matter in a few concrete ways:

• Reporting. Businesses that have to account for their emissions — whether for a client, a tender, or their own ESG commitments — can point at on-site renewable generation rather than a certificate bought from a supplier.
• Tender questions. "Where does your electricity come from?" is now a standard question in a lot of procurement processes. It is a straightforward answer here.
• Direction of travel. The park is not finished. Phase 3 — a gym and fitness studio, a ground-floor coffee shop and a first-floor conference suite — has planning permission, and it will be built on a site that already generates several times the power it needs.

None of which changes the fundamentals of renting space here: 20 suites from 500 to 8,000 sq ft, each one subdividable, fibre broadband, free parking outside the door and leases from three months. The solar farm is just the reason the meter runs the way it does.

Looking for solar-powered office space in Northamptonshire?

Grovelands Business Park is at East Haddon, about twenty minutes from Northampton and fifteen from Daventry, with the A5 and M1 Junction 18 roughly ten minutes away. Suites are available now — call 01327 830423 or book a viewing and we will show you the array on the way in.