Pembrokeshire Liquid Natural Gas terminal to be powered by solar farm

Katy Jenkins, local democracy reporter

The Dragon LNG terminal in Pembrokeshire has secured planning permission for a new solar farm to supply power to the site.

A 14 hectare site on grazing land between the terminal at Waterston and a strip of grassland next to the Milford Haven waterway will house a solar photovoltaic farm with potential capacity of just under 10MW of electricity for 40 years.

The farm will have nearly 18,500 solar panels of 540W as well as associated infrastructure and will produce electricity to be exported directly into the Dragon LNG facility, with no connection point to the National Grid included in the application.

Milford Haven Town Council and Llandstadwell Community Council supported the application, a planning report indicates.

Oil and gas

Officers found that it was not considered that the solar farm would result in “significant detrimental impact on local amenity in terms of visual impact.”

“The energy sector is clearly a significant contributor to the local economy. It is nevertheless primarily reliant on oil and gas including LNG.

“There is a need for the energy sector in Pembrokeshire to diversify towards renewable sources of energy not least because of the climate change challenge and the related changes to legislation including renewable energy targets,” their report added.

Members of Pembrokeshire County Council’s planning committee approved the application at a meeting on Wednesday.

Dragon LNG Ltd has developed an LNG import, storage and regasification terminal in Waterston, Milford Haven, Wales on the site of an old refinery. Construction of the new terminal was completed in August 2009 and the operations began immediately.

LNG

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is natural gas that has been cooled down to liquid form for ease and safety of non-pressurized storage or transport and the site at Waterston supplies around 2.2m tons of LNG per year.

LNG is delivered to the Milford Haven terminal by a fleet of LNG carriers / ships, and the gas is stored in two storage tanks of 160,000m³.

From the storage tanks the liquefied gas is pressurised, regasified and sent out to consumers via a gas pipeline connecting with the National Gas Transmission System (NTS).