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World's largest solar plant, powered by thin-film cells, may be huge, but not in the grand scheme |
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Aug 29, 2007 at 01:54 PM |
When they inaugurated the new solar-power installation in Brandis, Germany, last week, the initial six megawatts in use mark the first phase of what will eventually be a 40-MW site---the largest of its kind in the world.
When fully built out and operational in 2009, Juwi group's Waldpolenz project, built on a Soviet era air-force base outside of Leipzig, will supply 40 million kilowatt-hours of electricity to the grid, enough to power about 10,000 homes.
No small feat, but small is not a word one would use to describe this solar feld von traumen. The total area is about 110 hectares, or around 200 football pitches (that's soccer fields for the Yanks in the audience). In other words, the sprawl is larger than all the pitches of all the teams in the Big Four European football leagues---German Bundesliga, English Premiership, Italian Serie A, and Spanish La Liga---combined.
Cute stats, but let's put this in perspective: All that real estate and only 10,000 homes' worth of juice?! Conventional and nuclear power plants of similar scales would be supplying energy into hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. As cool as the Waldpolenz project is, it also underscores one of the challenges of large-scale solar power-plant installations---they have to be really large!
Another intriguing thing about the Brandis site is that the estimated 550,000 modules to be deployed (about 400,000 sq meters of module surface area) will be of the thin-film variety, cadmium-telluride (CdTe) to be precise. Quickly becoming the leading non-silicon thin-film solar player, First Solar will be cranking out CdTe modules for the project from its new Frankfurt (Oder) fab, which opened earlier this year.
Now for a more universal comparison of scale. Eliciting headlines like "Experts find gaping hole in the universe," news stories abounded over the weekend about the University of Minnesota scientists' discovery of what appears to be a ginormous, billion-light-year-wide void in the far reaches of our universe. Nothing's there, no galaxies or stars, no dark matter, nada, rien du tout. A void in its purest form. A mystery of the first order.
When confronted with such inconceivable enormities, something like the Waldpolenz solar farm, which appears to be huge to our proud Terran eyes, doesn't even register a blip.
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