Japanese renewable energy project developer Eurus Energy is scheduled to begin construction on an 115MW AC solar park in Japan. The park will be spread across two sites, and is expected to be the largest PV plant in the country.
According to Eurus, the Eurus Rokkasho Solar Park will be in Aomori prefecture, in the northern tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu.
The completion date is set for November 2015. The park will utilise 510,000 panels of single-crystal silicon photovoltaic cells, manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric and SunPower. It will generate enough electricity to power 38,000 average households a year, reducing annual carbon dioxide emissions by around 70,000 tonnes.
Announced in May this year, the plant is expected to cost around ¥49 billion (US$500 million), according to reports by Bloomberg.
The solar park is set in two plots of land across a 253 hectare site, in the Mutsu-Ogawara Industrial Park, where unusually for Japan, there are large scale plots of land available for industrial use. Mutsu-Ogawara Industrial Park is a 5,300 hectare development which includes land being used for emergency crude petroleum tanks, equivalent to seven days daily consumed volume nationally, and low and high level radioactive waste storage facilities. The north of Japan is noticeably colder than the south of the country and annual average temperature is around ten degrees centigrade in the area where the new solar park will be located.
