Tour Of Perovo Solar Power Station (CT Exclusive — Interviews, Videos, Pictures)

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Following up on the teaser videos I shared last week, below are some videos with a lot more information about the Perovo Solar Power Station in Crimea, Ukraine. The very basic facts — which you’ll also hear in the interviews — are as follows:

• 6th-largest solar PV power plant in the world at the moment;
• largest solar PV power plant in the world when it was completed in 2011;
• took 9 months to complete;
• developed by Activ Solar*, an Austrian-based solar developer that has so far focused on development of utility-scale solar power plants in Ukraine.

If you’ve ever been curious about some of the details of large solar PV power plants, I think these videos should provide you with much of the info you crave. For more, we could always get you some answers from the folks over at Activ Solar. Also, I’ll publish a 45-minute video interview with Activ Solar’s COO in the coming days. Anyway, for now, check out the videos! (Numerous pictures are also included at the bottom.)

This first video is the longest and gives a fairly detailed overview of the Perovo Solar Power Station and some of the neat technical details there (try to ignore the horrible camera work in parts):

Here’s a view from further out (again, I will try to do better with the camera work in the future):

From the same spot, here’s a bit on why these utility-scale solar power plants are often built in 20 MW phases:

This next one is about a pretty interesting tidbit. It features some ancient graves that have been protected by the Ukrainian government. Right after this video was recorded, I found out the full story here. Apparently, an archaeologist sometime back was exploring one of these graves and he and his whole team died. No one could determine the cause of the deaths, so the government decided to protect these graves as “sacred” (or something like that). There are several such graves fenced off in different parts of these solar fields. Here’s the video for a look at one of them:

Here’s another quite interesting tidbit from the young man who drove me through a portion of Perovo Solar Park on a 4-wheeler. In this one, the young man notes that there was a blackout last winter across much of the large region of Crimea, but that Simferopol‘s lights stayed on thanks to this solar power plant:

Next are just a few fun videos. This first one features the “Have a Sunny Day!” sign at the entrance to the 40 MW section of the Perovo Solar Power Station:

And these next two are the two videos I shared previously in which I was riding on the back of a 4-wheeler through a segment of the solar farm. I absolutely love these videos, and have even made several of my non-cleantech friends watch them. Check ’em out if you have seen them:

Lastly, for one final smile, here’s a Ukrainian leader in energy efficiency (who was also on this tour with me) commenting on the local landscape:

Below are a bunch of photos of the Perovo Solar Power Station and my tour there. Some were taken by me and some were taken by an Activ Solar employee. If you’d like a higher resolution of any of these or if you’d like to know who to credit for any of them, just let me know!

*Activ Solar supported my trip to and around Ukraine, but the trip came with no stipulations as far as content on CleanTechnica. I simply asked the questions that interested me and am sharing the content that I think is valuable to a broad, global audience. Aside from Activ Solar, greencubator and Alternativa also supported my trip to and around Ukraine.