Green Energy: Ukraine to Launch Its First Solar Power Plant at Chernobyl

According to the company, the solar installation is to go on stream within weeks.

Credit: AFP

Ukraine’s Chernobyl is all set to launch its first solar plant to revive the abandoned territory.

The new one-megawatt power plant is located just a hundred metres from the new “sarcophagus”, a giant metal dome sealing the remains of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the worst nuclear disaster in the world.

Yevgen Varyagin, the head of the Ukrainian-German company Solar Chernobyl which carried out the project, said, “this solar power plant can cover the needs of a medium-sized village”, or about 2,000 flats.”

According to the company, the solar installation is to go on stream within weeks.

The group has spent one million euros on the structure which has about 3,800 photovoltaic panels installed across an area of 1.6 hectares, about the size of two football fields, and hopes the investment will pay for itself off within seven years.

Eventually, the region is to produce 100 times the initial solar power, the company says.

The amount of sunshine “here is the same as in the south of Germany,” says Varyagin.

Ukraine, which has stopped buying natural gas from Russia in the last two years, is seeking to exploit the potential of the Chernobyl uninhabited exclusion zone that surrounds the damaged nuclear power plant and cannot be farmed.

Ostap Semerak, Ukrainian Minister of the Environment and one of the promoters of placing solar projects in Chernobyl, said, “This territory obviously cannot be used for agriculture, but it is quite suitable for innovative and scientific projects.”

Ukrainian authorities offered investors nearly 2,500 hectares (25 square kilometres) for potential construction of solar power plants in Chernobyl.

Kiev has received about 60 proposals from foreign companies – including American, Chinese, Danish and French – who are considering participating in future solar developments in the area, according to Olena Kovalchuk, spokeswoman of the State Administration for the zone of Chernobyl.

Investors are attracted by the price that Ukraine has set for solar electricity, which “exceeds on average by 50 percent of that in Europe”, Oleksandr Kharchenko, executive director of the Energy Industry Research Center, said.

He adds that cheap land and the proximity of the power grids makes Chernobyl particularly attractive, though there is still no rush of western investors to the region.

Source: AFP