The facility was built with 140 heterojunction solar panels mounted on pontoon-type floats. The project is located at the site of the 320 MW Nizhne-Bureyskaya hydropower plant, owned and operated by Rushydro in the Russian Far East’s Amur region.
The floating facility covers a significant amount of the hydro power plant’s electricity demand that helps to increase the net electricity supply into the grid and improve the efficiency of the hydropower supply.
Rushydro announced a plan to expand the use of solar energy across its service territory in June 2017. At the time, the company said it wanted to deploy off-grid medium-sized PV plants across remote areas of Yacutia, a region in Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District. The company’s PJSC RAO ES East unit, which operates in isolated areas of the Russian Far East, is also targeting the installation of 146 MW of renewable energy generation capacity.
At that time, Hevel Solar also announced that it intended to build off-grid solar plants in the Russian Far East, the country’s easternmost region with limited access to electricity and transmission networks. The region, which is the largest and the least populated district of Russia, has the poorest energy and transport infrastructure in the country. In order to improve its infrastructure, the Russian government is seeking to attract investors primarily from the countries of the Asia-Pacific region.
*Article was amended to reflect that the PV plant has an installed power of 52 kW and not 1.2 MW as previously reported.
