Germany-based juwi group has received building approval for the world’s biggest photovoltaic (PV) power plant, the 40-megawatt “Waldpolenz” solar park.
The thin-film solar PV plant is being built on a former military air base east of Leipzig, with an expected completion date of the end of 2009.
Currently the biggest PV plant in the world has an output capacity of around 12 megawatts.
The area is about one kilometre wide and two kilometres long. It takes more than an hour to walk around it. “The surface area of the PV installation compares to about 200 soccer fields,” says juwi co-managing director Matthias Willenbacher.
The plant will be built on half the 220 hectares of the base and will be comprised of 550,000 First Solar thin-film modules.
At about Euro 3,250 per kilowatt (U.S. $4,226), the plant is 20%-40% cheaper than the going German market price. “Large-scale projects such as these make a huge contribution to making solar electricity more competitive,” says juwi cofounder Willenbacher.
“Within just a few years the price of solar electricity produced on your own rooftop will be cheaper than the power supplied by the energy utilities,” says Willenbacher.
“Photovoltaics will then reach completely new dimensions because everyone will want their own installation. That will launch an unprecedented boom.” Juwi forecasts this scenario within the next “eight to ten years”.
The investment for the “Waldpolenz” solar park amounts to Euro 130 million. Simultaneous to the development and licensing phases of the project, the juwi group along with the Sachsen LB Group assembled a professional equity capital and external financing scheme. The SachsenFonds GmbH – a closed-end fund marketing and administration company within the Sachsen LB Group – will offer equity to interested investors in the form of closed-end funds, presumably in summer of this year. The structured project financing will be provided by Sachsen LB.
“The expertise of the Sachsen LB Group in its strategic business area of funding alternative energy projects was a major motivation for us to give the financing mandate to the Sachsen LB Group,” says Fred Jung, co-CEO and cofounder of the juwi group.
“There are very few contiguous areas of this kind and size in Ger- many. We thank the town of Brandis and its mayor, Andreas Dietze, as well as the community of Bennewitz and its mayor, Werner Moser.” adds Willenbacher.
After just a year the solar power station will have produced the energy needed to build it.
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