Tracker-equipped solar park to power mineral oil tank facility in Austria

From pv magazine Germany

Austrian oil and gas provider OMV is planning to build a 5.59MW solar park at its Lobau oil tank facility near Vienna.

The company will invest around €4.5 million in the solar park, which will be connected to the facility’s internal grid and will be used exclusively to power its operations.

The plant will be built with solar trackers and bifacial panels provided by undisclosed manufacturers. OMV expects the trackers to increase electricity production by 10% compared to an installation with fixed mounting systems, and the bifacial modules to increase it by 5%.

At the site, OMV can store around 1.63 million cubic meters of crude oil, intermediate and finished products and additives in 87 containers.

The solar park is not the first photovoltaic project of the group, which is one of the largest listed industrial companies in Austria. At the end of 2020, OMV, together with the electricity producer Verbund, commissioned what was then the largest photovoltaic ground-mounted PV plant in Austria, with an output of 11.4MW.

The company has also installed photovoltaic systems for its own consumption on the roofs of its filling stations in Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. According to OMV, the group has decided to replace the previously purchased external electricity, which comes from coal, oil, gas and nuclear power, with self-produced renewable electricity.