Seven Megawatt Solar Plant in Germany Will Be World's Largest

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Construction will start this year on the largest solar photovoltaic (PV) plant in the world in Germany's Saarland. The plant will have a peak rated capacity of 7.4 megawatts (MW). The ground-mounted installation will be on an old mine site at Gottelborn and will comprise of 50,000 solar modules covering an area of 165,000 square meters.

Financing for the $43 million project is now in place. Opportunities for investments to be made in the project have been left open. The return on investment will be calculated on the basis of 45.7 cents per kilowatt-hour generated over the next 20 years.

City Solar AG (Leipzig, Germany), who are the contractors for the installation, say the power output will be equivalent to that needed to power around 3,500 German homes. The company has recently completed a 1.4 MW project at Saarbrucken airport with Sharp Solar (TK:6753) (Tokyo, Japan) and Conergy PV (Hamburg, Germany) modules in cooperation with Voltwerk (Hamburg) and SunTechnics (Hamburg).

Shell Solar (LSE:SHL) (London, UK) announced in January this year its plans to build the world's largest solar power station. This project has now been surpassed by the Saarland project. Shell and GEOSOL (Berlin, Germany) will bring a 5 MW plant onstream in July on the site of an old lignite mine ash deposit at Espenhain south of Leipzig. The freestanding array will consist of 35,000 solar modules and power will be fed directly into the local grid. The installation will use the new Shell SQ PV modules that are designed for high voltage and the delivery of the highest energy yields. Siemens AG is supplying the inverters, transformers and the medium voltage connection equipment.

The largest PV installation currently operating in Germany is the 4 MW plant at Regensburg. This has 32,740 PV modules and was built in twelve weeks on the site of an old ammunition depot in 2002.

The competition for the biggest and best solar PV power plant title indicates the strength of demand for this type of sustainable power in Germany.