A solar farm with 1,000 energy-making panels is planned for Denholme – and would be the biggest of its kind in the Bradford district.

And green campaigners are delighted by the scale of the proposed site on land behind Denholme Business Centre on Halifax Road.

Clayton-based alternative energy firm Heart and Solar are providing the expertise for the suggested installation, which has just been presented to Bradford planners.

“The new application is for 1,000 solar panels which can each produce 250 watts of electricity,” said the firm’s techincal director Julian Haddock.

“This has only been done on a relatively small scale in the Bradford area before and this will be the first proper solar farm in the district,” Mr Haddock said.

The site would provide electricity to power the Business Centre, plus a healthy surplus to be channelled into the National Grid.

Mr Haddock said: “We set up banks of solar panels, or “strings” as they are known, which turn sunlight into DC electricity like you get from a battery.

“That is then fed into inverters which turn it into AC which is then used or diverted into the National Grid.

“The total possible output would be 250 kilowatts, but due to the weather we don’t often get more than 80 per cent up here.

“The Denholme Business Centre will get first use and then anything else, such as electricity generated on Sundays, will go into the system.

“Photo-voltaic cells don’t switch off producing electricity apart from at night, obviously.”

Heart and Solar began three years ago and employs a 50-strong telesales workforce and army of installation engineers.

“We don’t really do other forms of alternative energy. We’ve stuck with solar power, which is what we know,” Mr Haddock said.

The solar farm will be owned by the Denholme Business Centre, which were happy to let him explain the application on its behalf.

Bradford Councillor Kevin Warnes (Green, Shipley) said he was delighted by the proposal.

“This is just the sort of thing we need more of across the district and this sounds like the perfect sort of location,” Coun Warnes said. “There is a big solar farm over in Leeds, but I don’t know of anything on this scale in the Bradford area. You have to go down to Cornwall, Somerset and other south-east parts where there has been major investment like this.

“And these sort of sites are tailor-made for low-carbon electricity production like solar and we need a lot more of them for energy security and local regeneration,” Coun Warnes said.