The Zonneweide Eemnes plant is the first commercial ground-mounted installation in the Randstad metropolitan area, which is among the most densely populated areas in Europe. It will supply some five million kWh of power every year. That corresponds to the average consumption of 1,500 households.
A new photovoltaics boom in the construction of ground-mounted plants has brought sixty per cent growth in comparison with the previous year for the Netherlands in the first half of the year alone.
With the Eemnes solar park, realised for KiesZon by the North German solar construction specialist SMP Montage, the construction boom is now reaching a metropolitan area since Zonneweide Eemnes is located in the Randstad metropolitan area in the west of the Netherlands, which also includes Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. It is the first solar park in this region, in which 8.2 million people live in an area of around 8.3 square kilometres – a particular challenge in terms of material logistics and construction.
“Management of the construction phase was complex,” says Michael Manfred Fischer, SMP Managing Director for Marketing and Sales. “We wanted to finish building the plant as quickly as possible, to keep the traffic volume low and not to put too heavy a burden on the community. That’s why we’ve used our own mounting system in Eemnes.” The new mounting system for ground-mounted solar plants from SMP Montage was developed in Germany and is also produced here. Fischer adds: “The system is virtually self-explanatory during installation. It is specifically designed so that it can be assembled with just two tools; that’s ideal when, as in Eemnes, the focus is on time savings.”
For SMP Montage, Zonneweide Eemnes is the latest in a string of successful large-scale projects in the Netherlands. In the summer, the Hamburg-based company realised the largest single-roof PV installation in the Netherlands for KiesZon on an 8 hectare logistics roof in Venlo. The largest Dutch ground-mounted PV plant Scaldia, a project by ibvogt with a nominal output of 54.5 MWp, was connected to the grid at the end of October.
