Work has commenced on a bridge spanning the River Thames that will include a canopy consisting of thousands of solar panels.
A solar bridge in Brisbane, Queensland is about to lose its title of the world’s only solar bridge and will be eclipsed by the Blackfriars station project.
4,400 Sanyo HIT solar panels will be installed, covering an area of 6,000 square meters – making it also the largest solar panel array in London.
The solar modules will create approximately 900,000kWh of clean electricity annually, providing 50% of the station’s energy requirements and slashing its carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 511 tonnes each year.
The company handling the solar engineering and installation is London-based Solarcentury. Derry Newman, chief executive of Solarcentury says the impact of this project goes beyond the power the solar modules will generate.
“Station buildings and bridges are fixed parts of our urban landscape and it is great to see that this one will be generating renewable energy every day into the future. Unknown to most, there are many hundreds of buildings now powered by solar in the capital as investment in this technology increases. For people to see that solar power is working is a vital step towards a clean energy future.”
Mr. Shigeki Komatsu, solar division director of SANYO Component Europe GmbH, said the company’s HIT solar modules are ideal for structures where maximum power generation is required from an area where load must be considered.
Sanyo HIT solar panels combine a thin layer of monocrystalline silicon layer encased in ultra-thin amorphous silicon layers. The latest HIT models from Sanyo provide overall panel efficiency, that is, the amount of sunlight that is converted to electricity, in the region of 18.6%.
The Sanyo HIT has been a popular choice in Australia for high performance commercial and home solar power systems for its abilities to perform well in high temperatures and smaller footprint compared to other modules; allowing more solar electricity to be generated from a given area.
