Renewable Energy & Environment

With climate change being an ever increasing concern, understanding renewable energy is key to the future success of many of our clients.

Overview

The ability to get the most from renewable energy sources and understanding environmental regulation is becoming ever more important to many businesses and individuals alike.

We offer practical solutions, using the expertise of our specialist lawyers, who have many years of experience in dealing with the legal issues relating to renewable energy and environmental regulation.

Featured experience

The team has recently handled a number of different renewable energy projects, including advising on taking a lease to construct and run a large scale anaerobic digestion facility, negotiating of terms of the power purchase agreement and granting an underlease to a national electricity power company to take the supply generated by the facility.

The team regularly reserve rights to extract mines and minerals on the disposal of land and draft overage agreements relating to the potential future extraction of mines and minerals.

In preparation for the disposal of farms, the team have dealt with various renewable and environmental issues including water abstraction issues via a borehole, advising on the terms of onerous environmental schemes and granting leases for PV solar panels.

We also have a very active team advising landowners on the grant of options to photovoltaic (PV) solar farm developers.  These generally involve options conditional upon the grant of planning consent, and then the grant of long-term leases allowing for the installation and operation of the solar farm.  We advise our clients on the meaning of the obligations in such leases, which have a lot of features not seen in other sorts of leases, including obligations about not shading, non-competition, to enter into ‘direct agreements’ with funders of such schemes and agreements with the local authority and power companies to facilitate such developments and their operation.    We advise landowners on the ways in which term-end reinstatement risk is addressed in such arrangements by landowners.

We also deal with ‘battery farm’ options and leases, which have similar structures and issues.

We are increasingly acting for both landowners and the operators in the rapidly growing sector of Electric Vehicle charging facility leases which, like solar farm lease, are an unusual form of lease reflecting a novel commercial opportunity, where market practice is rapidly evolving and the demand for EV charging facilities is growing very rapidly.

The team has also recently advised in relation to eco-labelling and other issues in connection with international standards for sustainable fisheries and advised a company in relation to alleged pollution from its factory site.