Lightsource Renewable Energy, the UK's leading solar energy generator, today announces the formation of a new arm to its rapidly growing team of specialists.
The company is now taking maintenance matters in-house with a new team of highly skilled engineers. Peers of Lightsource within the solar industry already know of the company's strategy to control functions in-house, so this step can be seen as a natural progression as the business continues to grow rapidly.
This new division of Lightsource named the O&M Team (Operations & Maintenance) has already created 16 full time positions as a starting point and a further 15 new positions are expected to follow in the next 6 months. These roles differ slightly when compared with Lightsource's headquarters in London which currently boasts almost 150 full-time positions, created in the short space of just over 2 years.
Mark Turner, Operations Director for Lightsource explains, "These new specialist maintenance jobs are created locally to our operational solar farms and therefore benefit the local economy."
The O&M Team is headquartered at the Lightsource Bath Office with the engineers spending the majority of their time on site in the South West, Southern England or East Anglia. They are easily recognisable in their corporate uniforms and company vehicles. Collectively they share over 200 years of electrical experience covering both low and high voltage operations.
" By directly employing the maintenance teams Lightsource employs around three times more local people per acre than the average for agriculture. So whilst our business contributes over £2m per annum to the rural economy through rental payments to farmers we are also bringing skilled jobs to the regions", Mark continues
"Initially we have set up our new maintenance team as 'subcontractors' for an increasing number of the construction firms (EPCs) that build our plants. No one will care about our plants as much as we do. Our team will not only maintain the plants but actively look to improve the performance of the plant. They will go to the EPC and say 'We think this needs attention, we'd like to work on it."
"We're moving to provide the full O&M performance wrap as our plants come out of their warranty period and we're being approached by other plant owners to provide them with the same service." Mark elaborates.
The addition of a maintenance team to the business creates a whole new revenue stream for Lightsource and the knowledge gained by working on the assets will be extremely valuable to the development of future projects.
"We will be much more knowledgeable about what it takes to build a high performing, maintainable on site and we can feed that back to our EPCs enabling them to build even better plants on the future." Mark concludes.
