back	December 10, 2008 RSS

Solar City Gelsenkirchen

There's hot competition in Gelsenkirchen to claim the city's largest solar installation. Who can generate the most electricity with these gleaming rooftop modules? The sun is already beaming down on more than 180 photovoltaic cells in Solar city Gelsenkirchen - providing a total of three million kilowatt hours of energy per year. The front-runner in the solar power league is currently the Schaffrath housing estate with 5,300 panels. The 240-metre-long ore and coal bunker of the former Schalker Verein steelworks has a photovoltaic plant with 1,621 modules producing 320,000 kilowatt hours annually. The stadium of the legendary Schalke 04 soccer club, the Veltins Arena, has its own train station which is crowned by the world's largest solar sail, generating an annual 70,000 kilowatt hours of power. At the LOXX logistics centre, finally, solar modules provide 290,000 kilowatt hours a year, thus saving 255 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The panels, incidentally, are produced by the Gelsenkirchen company Scheuten Solar. Scheuten is one of Europe's most modern manufacturers of solar modules. Needless to say it has its own photovoltaic power station up on the roof, supplying a major part of its energy requirements. Read the whole article by Barbara Underberg in "The Ruhr Metropolis" issue of MINIInternational.