Solar Magazine – Solarfield includes the largest solar thermal park in the Netherlands: ‘Improve the position in SDE++ necessary’
Early next year, Solarfields and K3 Delta will start construction on Dorkwerd: the third largest solar thermal park in the world, and the largest in the Netherlands.
That connection to a connection in 2023 via a heat network to 2,600 Groningen homes made of sustainable energy. Director Jelmer Pijlman: ‘This project is absolutely exciting for all months. You can calculate what you want, but you won’t know if it works as planned until the park is connected. This technology is clearly indispensable for our energy transition. We see this project as a prelude to scaling up.’
Solarfields is the Dutch foundation in ground-based solar PV. That of the project development with 277 megawatt peak available in the autumn 2020 round of the SDE++. This concerns 3 huge solar parks. The first is a 96.3 megawatt peak installation in the Noordoostpolder that shares the location and grid connection with a reed wind farm. The other 2 are planned in the province of Groningen and have an overview of 94.4 and 86.0 megawatt peak. At one of these solar parks, Zonnevelden wants to realize the grid connection to the high-voltage grid via a private electricity grid. With these solar parks, Zonneveld is taking another step towards the ultimate goal: the realization of 4 gigawatt peak of sustainable energy for 1 million households by 2030.
Urgent and big
Pijlman: ‘Despite the fact that we have completed several large projects, we are still only 10 percent away from meeting that ambition. valid for the Netherlands. We now only have 10 percent green electricity in the mix and therefore still have to make 90 percent of our power supply more sustainable. we’re short on time, and not just because science says so. The first effects of climate change are visible to anyone who does not close their eyes to it. Our task is therefore urgent and large. The roll-out of solar PV as a convenient and easiest source of sustainable power must be achieved. Putting solar panels on roofs will not get us there. Ground-based solar parks are needed. In principle that is no problem: we only need 1 percent less than our land area.’
economies of scale
Pijlman recognizes that realizing solar parks on land is not an option. Apart from the required investments due to the congesting of the electricity grid, including the expansion of pressure on financing as the reason. This is partly due to the decreasing base amounts in the SDE++. A second cause is the increasingly strict requirements with regard to landscape integration. ‘So the costs become the certainty of a higher return’, says Pijlman. ‘Then you have to look for economies of scale. Current national and local policy is at the expense of small developments, especially where, for example, you also have to pull a long cable to the grid. It is therefore logical that we are more often involved in major projects announced in the last SDE++ round. In addition, we focus on large sunroofs and solar carports; nobody has a problem with that.’
Read the full article in the Solar Magazine Market Guide Solar Energy 2022 here.