Liverpool John Lennon Airport gets set to switch on its £3m solar farm as it reveals it has already slashed its electricity usage by more than one-third since 2010 despite handling record numbers of passengers. Tony McDonough reports
In the next few weeks Liverpool John Lennon Airport (LJLA) will switch on its £3m solar farm for the first time, generating up to 3MW of renewable onsite electricity every year.
This will provide up to 25% of the annual power needs of the airport overall, including the terminal building and its ultra-powerful runway lights. This is the latest step of LJLA’s journey to decarbonise its operations.
And LJLA’s head of environment and sustainability, Andrew Dutton, has told LBN the airport has already made huge strides in slashing its energy use in the past few years, despite smashing records in terms of passenger numbers and quality of customer service.
In 2024 the airport handled more than 5m passengers for the first time in several years thanks to the arrival of Jet2 and the continued expansion of airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair.
And in September LBN revealed the airport saw more than 616,000 passengers take off and land in August – making it the busiest month in its 92-year history. Yet, despite these figures the airport is using less, not more electricity with fewer carbon emissions.
Andrew said: “In 2010 the airport used around 14.5m kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity and now that is down to under 10m kWh a year. That is thanks to both the great efforts of all the staff at the airport and the investment in energy efficiency.
“We are busier than we have ever been but we are using less electricity than we were 15 years ago. Through an education programme we have helped people to cut down the energy we use both at work and at home.
“To achieve this we seek to only use the energy we need, no more and no less and look at ways in which we can do things differently. More obvious stuff such as LED lights and looking at things such as distributing heat have also been important in our evolution.
“This has been a big thing for us and is a big step towards the decarbonisation of the airport operation. I believe we have done this in the right way.
“And the lesson I’ve learned is that you don’t refer to it as wasting energy, you call it energy we don’t need to use, so it’s a more positive statement.”
Now LJLA’s decarbonisation drive is about to step up onto a new level. Final cabling is now being installed on the solar farm, which is located on a 22-acre site to the east of the runway.
The airport has worked with Activ8 Energies in partnership with SSE Airtricity Activ8 on the project.
On sunny days during the summer months the airport hopes the facility will be a small exporter of surplus power to the local grid. This project is a key part of LJLA’s decarbonisation plan which lays out a path to decarbonise the ground operation by 2040.
Andrew prefers to say “decarbonisation” rather than “net zero”. He explained: “We want to decarbonise the operation, and I prefer to say that to net zero. We want to find ways that are non-carbon reliant rather than just mitigating the carbon emissions at a later stage.”
Once the solar photovoltaic (SPV) farm is connected to the airport’s internal network there will be a short period of testing and then the plan is the system will be fully operational by late September to early October.
“This last bit of work will see the cabling installed and the joining together of the big copper wires that are very thick,” added Andrew. “Because we are an airport we have to be a bit more careful.
“We can’t just dig a trench across the airfield. Everything just takes a little more time than we first expected.
“It was amazing to see it while it was being built with the frames going in, all in perfectly straight lines. The solar panels were fastened to those in late May and they all had to be individually connected, with the transformer then installed in July and August.
“The SPV panels are interlaced, and each is connected to the next but one. If anything did happen to them from big bird splats or accidental breakages, because they are in series affecting one can affect several. By interlacing you minimise the impact.”
LJLA’s solar installation works in the same way as one on a domestic home. The system automatically defaults to the solar panels and when they generate power it is like “turning the meter backwards, but legally”.
There will be times when the system will produce excess power, for example on long sunny days at the height of summer. At such times the airport will export power to the grid. At other times, in winter for example, LJLA will require power from the grid from its usual external supplier.
“You obviously get a lot less sunlight in the winter than in the summer and we will take a look at that in the future,” said Andrew. “The next big thing for us is to wean ourselves off natural gas for heating. We have a plan for that, it is just a question of when we can do it.
“There are bits of the terminal that are heated with heat pumps already. They were put in as long ago as 2010. We will probably migrate towards heat pumps in the future.”
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LJLA won’t be using batteries to store any energy in the first instance, but Andrew added that could happen further down the line.
“This project is part of our evolution,” he said. “Society spent 250 years making itself reliant on fossil fuels and now we have a target of just a few years to reverse that. In practice we will do as much as we can.
“In some cases the technology will evolve later. How this technology is adapted and implemented will be society decisions – we are trying to be part of the solution.
“There are things that we can do and things that we can’t, for now we are focused on what we can and to do it to the best of our abilities.”