Renewable energy company RWE from Germany has decided to invest in floating solar PV technology by announcing its maiden project to have 6.1 MW capacity. The Amer Floating PV Project will be located in Noord-Brabant province of Netherlands' Geertruidenberg region.
RWE will build the project with 13,400 solar panels on a lake near the company's own biomass and hard-coal Amer Power Plant. Construction on the project is expected to start in August 2021, and commissioning to be done by the end of 2021.
The floating PV facility will be co-located with a 0.5 MW rooftop PV plant on site that has been operational since 2018, that formed phase I of Solar Park Amer. RWE is also adding 2.3 MW ground mounted PV capacity here which is already under construction. Altogether once complete, the Solar Park Amer will have 9 MW capacity—equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of about 2,300 Dutch households.
"Our first floating PV project demonstrates our ambition to drive forward the energy transition with innovative technologies and clean energy supply," said RWE Generation and Country Chair for the Netherlands, Roger Miesen.
Another German company BayWa r.e. renewable energy GmbH has been making inroads into the growing floating solar space of the Netherlands. In January 2021, it completed 2 such projects with 29.2 MW combined capacity here through its local subsidiary GroenLeven (see BayWa Installs 29.2 MW Floating Solar In Netherlands).