Vattenfall has commissioned Germany’s largest agri-solar park – the 76MWp Tützpatz project.
The agri-PV park (pictured) features 146,000 solar modules and is located across a 93-hectare site, the equivalent to around 130 football pitches.
The site is in the Mecklenburg Lake District in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
The offtaker is Power and Air Condition Solution Management (PASM), a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. It has signed a 10-year power purchase agreement for all the green electricity generated by the project.
Tützpatz consists of three sub-areas, on which both animal husbandry and arable farming will take place in the future.
On the Tützpatz 1 sub-area, the solar modules were elevated on classic frame systems with different angles of inclination. In the future, chickens will be kept in mobile barns on designated areas. Six mobile chicken coops, each with up to 2500 birds, are being planned.
On the sub-areas Tützpatz 2 and Tützpatz 3, arable farming with different crop rotations is to be carried out in the future. Here, tracker systems were erected as a substructure for the solar modules. The modules are mounted on a longitudinal axis, on which they can then be tilted, providing space for agricultural machinery to work on the land.
Vattenfall said the park is currently the largest ground-mounted solar project in Germany, combining power generation with arable farming and animal husbandry.
The developer has been building the project without state funding in the town of Tützpatz since the end of 2023.
Head of the solar and batteries division at Vattenfall Claus Wattendrup said: “Tützpatz is the first agri-PV project that we are implementing on this scale.
“The entire team has done real pioneering work and has led the project to success with a lot of personal commitment despite some hurdles.
“I would like to thank all those involved who can be proud of their achievements. With Tützpatz, we are showing 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 of the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said at the opening ceremony: “The agri-PV park in Tützpatz is the largest plant of its kind in Germany. This shows how agriculture, the energy industry and climate protection can be cleverly combined.
“For Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the energy transition is a once-in-a-century opportunity: We can locate climate-neutral industry in green industrial parks and thus add value and other well-paid jobs to the state. That’s exactly why showcase projects like this are so important. They make visible how the future is being shaped in our country.”