Commercial Team

The drive to cleaner forms of energy has been gathering pace for a number of years.   With world energy supplies of traditional fossil fuels in decline, governments around the world have been implementing and driving policies that have facilitated and subsidized a push towards cleaner forms of energy.

The government in the UK introduced the use of “Feed in tariffs” which were specific subsidies to renewable energy companies to implement these forms of energy, and previously this focused significantly on solar and wind energy schemes.  Those schemes targeted both the residential and the commercial markets, with the most visual of these probably being solar panels on houses and wind turbines dotted across swathes of the country (and also off shore).

In more recent times the government has reduced the subsidies for wind and solar schemes but the general movement towards clean energy does not currently show any signs of slow down, and recently movement has been for battery powered storage schemes on farmland which can hold, and store power and release it to the grid as and when required.

So how could Elliot Mather LLP help in relation to these schemes?  We are finding that land and property owners are increasingly being approached by renewable energy companies to install these schemes on available land and property. These commercial schemes often need complicated legal agreements drawn up, negotiated and agreed between both the renewable energy commercial firms and land and property owners.  These frequently involve option and lease agreements and are not that widely understood in the commercial property legal sector and which need to be very carefully considered, ensuring that these agreements contain sufficient protections for land and property owners and also to ensure that the restrictions imposed are fair and proportional between the parties and in the circumstances.  

We have industry specific knowledge in relation to this area and we at Elliot Mather have a team that can assist landowners in advising on all aspects of these legal documents and have industry specific knowledge in this area.  We can guide you through the legal agreements and the process to ensure land and property owners are fully aware of the significance of the agreements they are looking to enter into.