Enercity is to build a new 198MW wind farm with up to 33 wind turbines near the municipality of Schleife, Germany.
Enercity have concluded a cooperation agreement with the owners of the area, the company Forst Rohne.
The project in the Saxon district of Görlitz comprises two construction phases.
Initially, four wind turbines with a total output of 24MW will be built on the Hochkippe, where the current regional planning has identified locations suitable for wind.
The second, larger construction phase includes 29 wind turbines in the forest with a total capacity of 174MW.
These areas, which cover around 900 hectares, have yet to be designated as suitable wind sites by the regional planning authorities.
Enercity chief executive Dr Susanna Zapreva said: “With the project, we are pushing ahead with the expansion of renewables in Germany.
“In the future, this wind farm will be able to meet the needs of a large city with more than 155,000 households in a climate-neutral manner and will generate 540 million kwh of green electricity every year.”
For Enercity, the project is the next step in achieving the strategic growth target of operating one gigawatt of wind energy capacity in-house by 2025.
Extensive areas of commercial forests, such as in the district of Görlitz, are very well suited for wind turbines, since the distances to residential buildings are usually greater here than in open spaces.
In addition, this solution reduces the visibility of wind turbines in the landscape.
With the compensatory measures for the projects, enercity always makes sure that ecologically valuable forests are created that are more resilient to climate fluctuations than the previous commercial forests.
Almost half of the 11.4 million hectares of German forest stock is non-natural commercial forest.
Not even 1,000 hectares of it are currently equipped with around 2,000 wind turbines – only 0.008% of the total forest area in Germany.
A wind turbine with an output of 5MW requires around one hectare of forest area (including temporary construction/access areas, for the operating time it is only 0.5 hectares).
The wind turbine generates around 16 million kilowatt hours of electricity and thus saves 6,400 tons of CO2 per year (compared to generation from a gas power plant).
The average climate protection contribution of one hectare of forest is around 10.4 tons of CO2.
The climate protection effect of one hectare of commercial forest used for wind power is 600 times higher.
The wind farm is the first component of a planned “ecological power plant” in Schleife.