A large open pit brown coal mine near Brudzew in central Poland is to be transformed into the country’s largest solar farm. The company behind the project – Poland’s biggest brown coal power generator – hopes it can become a symbol of green energy transformation.
The solar facility will span an area of 100 hectares. It is expected to be the largest such farm in Poland, producing 70 MWp of power, 18.5 times more than the current largest plant in Czernikowo, near the northern city of Toruń, which produces 3.77 MW.
The project is the result of a 160 million zloty (€35 million) deal between Zespół Elektrowni Pątnów-Adamów-Konin (ZE PAK), a consortium of power plants that run on brown coal, and ESOLEO, a provider of photovoltaic installations.
“It will be the first investment on such a scale in Poland,” says Piotr Woźny, chairman of the ZE PAK’s supervisory board. He hopes the project will “become a symbol of transformation” in Poland’s coal-dominated energy sector, reports Polsat News.
ZE PAK is the the largest Polish producer of electricity generated from brown coal, and the fourth largest electricity producer overall in Poland.
Since 1958, the company has operated the Konin power plant in the Greater Poland Province, Poland’s first to be powered by lignite supplied from nearby open pits. It later merged with the nearby Pątnów and Adamów coal plants.
In August this year, however, ZE PAK announced that it would shut down its brown coal mine in Adamów by the end of 2020. The mine had previously been used to supply the Adamów plant until that closed in 2017. It then powered the nearby Pątnów plant.
Wednesday’s deal between ZE PAK and ESOLEO was also signed with the former group’s own renovation company, PAK Serwis, which hopes to gain experience in large solar projects. The companies will together be responsible for the solar farm’s design, assembly and handover for use in August 2021.
ZE PAK has hailed the project as a way of providing alternative employment for those who until recently worked in the local coal mines. The closure of mines – as Poland seeks to move beyond its current reliance on coal – has provoked ongoing protests in places reliant on the mining industry.
“Already in October, the first employees of the mines belonging to the ZE PAK group – taking part in the construction of the farm in Brudzewo – will start working in the green energy sector,” says Henryk Sobierajski, chairman of the ZE PAK management board.
While Poland still relies on coal for around 73% of its energy production, it has recently started to embrace more renewable energy, particularly from solar. The country’s solar capacity increased by 900MW last year.
According to a report from AltEnergyMag earlier this year, Poland has become the fifth largest solar producer in Europe, almost quadrupling its capacity in one year. State funds are also subsiding micro-PV systems through the government’s “My Electricity” programme.
The International Energy Agency estimates that Poland will increase its renewable power capacity by 65% from 2019 to 2024, mostly from onshore wind farms, writes Bloomberg. There are also plans for up to 10GW of offshore wind on the Baltic coast by 2035.
The biggest role in increasing the proportion of renewables in the Polish energy balance has been played by private energy companies and prosumer firms, which together built 81% of all renewable power installed in 2013-2019.
By contrast, the contribution of the public sector and state-owned energy concerns to building renewable energy sources in these years was under 15%.
Main image credit: Brookhaven National Lab/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
