Vattenfall commissions 76MW agriPV plant in Germany

Developer Vattenfall completed the project without subsidy. A subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, Power and Air Condition Solution Management, will acquire all the electricity generated by the plant under a 10-year power purchase agreement.

The project consists of three sub-areas. The largest, Tützpatz 1, houses 43.3MW of bifacial modules mounted on fixed-tilt racking systems. Alongside the array, chickens will be kept in mobile coops on designated areas. Six mobile chicken coops, each with up to 2,500 birds, are planned.

The arrays in Tützpatz 2 and 3, 13.3MW and 19.4MW respectively, combine bifacial modules with single-axis tracker systems. They have been designated for future arable farming, with the tracker rows spaced further apart to allow farm machinery to access and work the fields.

Combining agriculture with PV generation counters one of the main criticisms of utility-scale solar, namely that it takes productive farmland out of use.

Claus Wattendrup, head of solar and batteries at Vattenfall, said: “Tützpatz is the first agriPV project of this size that we are implementing. With Tützpatz, we are demonstrating that agriculture and fossil-free power generation are not in competition with each other, but can complement each other perfectly.”

Heiko Geue, minister of finance and digitalisation for the State of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the project is located, added: “The agri-PV park in Tützpatz will be the largest facility of its kind in Germany. It demonstrates how agriculture, the energy industry, and climate protection can be intelligently combined.”