England isn't known for its sunny climate, but nevertheless it is possible to generate energy from the sun's power. The UK's largest solar rooftop array will go live today on a warehouse in Suffolk in South East England. The 7000 solar panels installed have a capacity of 1.65MW and cover the area of a two and a half soccer pitches. The warehouse, for plastic packaging manufacturer Promens, will be nearly 100% powered by its own solar array, making it far greener than other facilities relying on grid-delivered electricity derived from many sources, including very polluting ones like coal.

The finance for the development came from many small investors in a fund managed by Octopus Investments, and the installation was constructed by Gropotec and is managed by Lightsource Renewable Energy. As the UK government has recently changed the criteria for renewable investment, starting in August, it looks likely that this project will be the largest roof-top installation in the UK for the foreseeable future.

Nicholas Boyle, CEO of Lightsource said, "This roof-top solar plant highlights the important role solar generation has to play in our future energy mix, particularly when the energy it produces is used at source removing the need for wasteful distribution networks. Getting this site online before the August deadline was a considerable achievement and it is a real credit to Grupotec, for their speed and coordination during design and construction, and to Promens as a company for their commitment to the project and a willingness to do what was needed to get it completed."

A disused tin mine in Cornwall has this week become one of the last large-scale solar power plants to benefit from the government's "clean energy cashback" scheme.

The solar farm  -- predicted to generate 1.4 megawatts of power each year, making it the UK's largest -- is the result of a joint venture between Lightsource Renewable Energy and solar panel supplier Solarcentury. The park covers a 2.9 hectare plot at Wheal Jane near Truro and will generate 1,437MWh of power per year from around 5,700 modules. This will be enough to power the equivalent of 430 homes in the area, saving more than 737 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.

It will be one of the few large photovoltaic projects in the UK to benefit from "feed-in tariff" (FiT) rates, also known as "clean energy cashback". The government programme was designed to incentivise solar panel installation by paying businesses for the energy they generate, even if they use all of the energy themselves. The initiative offers those generating energy a rate that is well over the rate at which utility companies can cell the electricity, because it factors in the fact that solar power is more expensive to produce than fossil fuel power.