In March, according to a well-known children’s song, the farmer and his little horse start working in the fields – in April work will begin on a solar field east of the district town of Ebersberg: the Oberlaufing open-space photovoltaic system. This will be built by the municipal electricity supplier Eberwerk, which has been operating a comparable system in the northern district for a little over two years.
The system at the Weiler Haus in Markt Schwaben, which went online in summer 2020, recently even gained national fame. At a local meeting with the President of the Municipal Council, Uwe Brandl, it was mentioned as an example of how the energy transition can work in the municipalities. One important aspect of the community day is the possibility of citizen participation in such projects. In the case of the system near Haus, there is a cooperative through which the people of Markt Schwaben, in particular, have acquired shares in the solar field.
A similar model will probably also exist for the Oberlaufing plant, explained Marcel Menzel from the Eberwerk recently in the Technical Committee of the Ebersberg City Council. In any case, there will be some form of citizen participation, but it has not yet been decided what kind. It would be possible either to participate through a loan or through the purchase of shares. This will probably only be decided once the plant has been built, Menzel continues.
As soon as the transformer station can be delivered, the system goes online
According to the current planning, this could well be the case in the fall. At the Eberwerk, it is expected that the system will be able to go online at the end of September. The first work should start in just over a month, at least if the required parts are delivered by Easter as planned. If this is the case, the actual system, i.e. the solar field, should be completed by mid-May. The fact that it cannot be connected to the grid immediately is because the transformer station cannot be delivered until early or mid-September.
As soon as the system is connected to the grid, it should have a maximum output of 1.5 megawatts, similar to the one in Markt Schwaben. To be precise, it is 1,529,550 watts, which are generated by a total of 2781 modules. According to Eberwerk, this theoretically corresponds to the average requirement of 500 households. The system could feed a total of 1.5 to 1.7 gigawatt hours into the grid per year.
The solar field on the former district waste dump is so far the only one of its kind in the Ebersberg area.
(Photo: Christian Endt)
Oberlaufing would be – in addition to the PV system built more than a decade ago on the old district garbage dump Schafweide – the second large solar system on Ebersberger Flur. But probably not the last. About a year ago, the city council approved the location concept for photovoltaic systems. This defines so-called potential areas that are considered suitable for the construction of open-space solar systems. Most of them are south and east of the city, especially along the railway line towards Wasserburg, the plan provides for some areas for PV systems. It is therefore quite possible that the Oberlaufingen solar field will soon have appropriate neighbors.