Solar panels have been fitted to the roof of an archive centre in Brighton 10 years after it opened.
The panels were installed at the Keep, in Woollards Way, Falmer, as part of a series of green energy projects funded by East Sussex County Council.
The £186,000 solar scheme at the Keep was funded by the county council, with contributions from Brighton and Hove City Council and Sussex University.
The panels are expected to reduce CO2 by about 23 tonnes within just 12 months and save around £45,000 from energy bills, up from early projections.
Payback had been expected within 10 years although, with conventional energy prices having gone up, the outlay could be recouped much sooner.
The deputy leader of the county council, Nick Bennett, said: “We are delighted to see the completion of another solar panel project which takes us a step closer to achieving our ambitious target of becoming carbon neutral as soon as possible and by 2050 at the latest.”
Councillor Bennett said: “It’s projects like these, such as installing heat pumps in schools and using clean energy for street lighting, that will help us reach our goal.”
The solar panel project at the Keep was carried out by CDS Electrical Services, from Polegate. The company, along with AJ Taylor, from Brighton, and the Frankham Consulting Group, have completed 12 projects across East Sussex since 2021.
The Keep, which opened in 2013, holds and conserves historic documents and provides free public access to them for research on family history, property history and academic study.
It was built as a £19 million replacement for the East Sussex Record Office, at the Maltings, in Lewes.
The Keep also houses the Sussex University special collections including the Mass Obs – or Mass Observation project – archive.
And it contains the Royal Pavilion and Museums Local History Collections along with the library and office of The Sussex Family History Group.
