Shortly before the turn of the year, Abo Wind connected two solar parks in Rhineland-Palatinate to the grid. The project in Zerf has a total output of 5.1 megawatts. At 13.4 megawatts, Niederkirchen is the company's largest photovoltaic project to date in Germany. This solar park will not maintain the record for long; construction work on two larger projects will begin in 2024. Abo Wind's PV business in Germany has also developed well: "We are planning to start construction on more than ten projects in 2024," says Thomas Treiling, area manager at Abo Wind for project development in Germany. “We have also secured areas and installation decisions with the potential for several hundred megawatts of PV output.”
The project in Niederkirchen brought some challenges for the specialist departments at Abo Wind. On the hilly terrain, they had to align the PV modules at three different angles to the sun in order to achieve optimal electricity yield. In addition, the approximately ten kilometer long cable route to the grid entry point crosses two districts, gas pipelines and a NATO pipeline. “The need for coordination on these topics extended the project process somewhat,” says the responsible team leader Sascha Derstroff. There were synergy effects elsewhere: “We were also able to use part of the cable route for our Dörnbach wind farm and thus reduce the impact on nature.”
The community was behind the project from the start. In addition to the rental income for the use of paths, Niederkirchen receives compensation of 0.2 cents per kilowatt hour fed in. That adds up to around 31,000 euros per year. The future operator of the solar park has now been determined: Stadtwerke Stuttgart. Abo Wind will take over the technical management in the first few years.
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