Taking environmental responsibility for Octopus generation sites

As one of the UK's largest operators of renewable generation, we've got a responsibility to make sure our sites are working safely and effectively. That's a legal obligation, as well as a moral one: and part of it involves occasionally finding local agricultural contractors to weed around our solar panels to make sure plants aren’t growing so high as to shade the panels or interfere with the electrical equipment on site, Last week, we discovered that a contractor that we chose made a mistake while managing one of our solar sites, Hill End Farm.

We briefed them to use a really precise spraying method to make sure that the weedkiller was only applied where it absolutely had to be, limiting any impact on the solar farm’s wildflower population. Sadly, our instructions weren't followed, and a wider area was sprayed by mistake which resulted in some wildflowers needlessly dying.

We're really sorry about this as we’re really proud of our approach to encouraging biodiversity where our turbines and solar panels are. It's not always easy, as solar farms are bound by various regulations (such as needing to control weeds, and returning the land after use to how we found it), but we’ve written about what we do at length before on our blog: “Making green energy greener”. As soon as we found out we’d actually inadvertently damaged some of the local flora, we sprung into action.

Over the bank holiday weekend, two people from OE Generation (including one of our Directors) visited Hill End Farm to take a look at the damage. We brought a wildflower expert along too to advise on how we could repair the damage to the local flora. Now, we’re working with the landowner and local experts to make things right at Hill End Farm – nurturing the impacted area, with reseeding where appropriate to ensure years of flourishing meadow in the future, and we're keen to discuss with the landowner on how we can go even further.

To make sure this never happens again at any of our sites, we’ve also immediately created a specialist team to oversee the impact of all our generation sites and ensure the effectiveness of all our on-site biodiversity projects too. As part of this, any third party suppliers we use to manage our sites (for example land agents, or agricultural contractors) will only join a project after making a formal commitment that the land must remain nurtured and maintained to its original use – meaning it stays as nature intended, bar any minimal weeding required to make sure the solar panels operate safely and effectively.