The cable will run from the 49.9MW Willows Green Solar Farm near Felsted will the built mainly under roads for 5.3km east of the proposed solar farm to Braintree Substation near Galleys Corner.

At full capacity, 50MW is enough to power ~60,000 homes! That’s enough for nearly 10% of all of Essex. Glad these are getting connected even though there’s plenty of North Sea oil and gas. UK! UK! UK!

    • @gomp@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      2510 months ago

      Absolutely! /s

      TBH, the mods should change the sidebar from “News from around the world!” to something like “News that have international relevance”… otherwise we can’t really scold people who post curiosity stories.

      • exscape
        link
        fedilink
        010 months ago

        50 MW global impact? It’s about 1/20 of a typical nuclear reactor.

        • @lntl@lemmy.mlOP
          link
          fedilink
          010 months ago

          haha, unfortunately comparisons with this solar farm can only be made in units of “Olympic swimming pools”

  • Franzia
    link
    fedilink
    1210 months ago

    I just wanna know how fat the cable is. Sounds like it is almost 3km in length.

    • Fidelity9373
      link
      fedilink
      910 months ago

      Depends on how they’re inverting the power. If they’re sticking with the DC voltage straight from the panel, that’s probably one thick cable. If each panel or group of panels has an inverter to go to high voltage (AC or DC) to a central location, you can proportionally scale the thickness as voltage increases.

  • Greyscale
    link
    fedilink
    English
    610 months ago

    why are they measuring solar farms in swimming pools

    • @lntl@lemmy.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      710 months ago

      I thought the same thing! When posting, I wanted to give a sense of scale and took this screenshot

      Ultimately, I settled on figuring how much of Essex that would cover.

      • Pons_Aelius
        link
        fedilink
        310 months ago

        I settled on figuring how much of Essex that would cover.

        which is not that helpful in worldnews…

        “for a 114 hectare solar farm east of School Lane”

        Now I have an idea of the actual size.

          • Pons_Aelius
            link
            fedilink
            310 months ago

            Sorry, that was not my intention at all.

            I would much prefer a world-news sub not be filled with the same stories (endless US/UK/EU politics etc) over and over again but rather have some interesting local stories from around the world.

            I was just pointing out that adding some more generic descriptions would make it more readable to the rest of the world.

    • @970372@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      2
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Well,

      1 Olympic Swimming pool = 50m * 25m according to wikipedia.

      That means: 1250m2 per pool. Now multiply this by 1140: 1.425.000m2. Which is 1.425 km2