Germany’s largest PV system is currently being built on the roof of a shopping center on the roof of the Ruhr Park Shopping Center in Bochum. The system consists of a total of over 3,600 modules and is expected to generate an annual electricity yield of over 1.4 million kilowatt hours. The shopping center is owned by the real estate company Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW), which only connected a similarly large system in the Paunsdorf Center in Leipzig at the end of October with 2,682 solar modules and an annual electricity yield of 1,100,000 kilowatt hours.
The Bochum plant is expected to save around 656 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The targeted internal consumption from the system, 643,000 kilowatt hours, will cover 44.8 percent of the total electricity consumption of the public areas of the Ruhr Park.
The system is being built in cooperation with the Bochum municipal utilities and is scheduled to go into operation in April 2024. Lars Horn, Center Manager at Ruhr Park Bochum, says: “Making renewable energies usable for our shopping center is an important step in our sustainability concept. The system is not only a symbol of the ecological responsibility that we take on site, but also offers direct economic benefits because it has a positive impact on energy purchases. With Stadtwerke Bochum we have an expert at our side with whom we have already worked successfully in the past. We are pleased about the project and the expansion of the cooperation with the municipal utilities.”