The largest utility-scale solar PV power plant yet constructed in Japan, the 82 MW Oita Solar Project, is now online. Commercial operations at the plant are now ongoing, helping to notably boost the country’s, and region’s, renewable energy capacity.
The new, nearly 100 MW solar plant is located in southern Japan, in Oita City, and was constructed by the noted conglomerate Marubeni. Electricity from the new plant is set to be sold to Kyushu Electric Power Company under a 20-year power purchase agreement. Annual output for the plant is expected to be somewhere around 87 million kWh.
The solar modules used for the Oita project were provided by manufacturer Hanwha Q Cells.
There are currently a number of other large utility-scale projects in the works in Japan. While most of them won’t rival or supersede the Oita project, it is good to see such projects becoming more common.
For example, the aforementioned Marubeni conglomerate is currently working on several other (relatively) large projects — including a 49 MW project near the Mei and Aichi prefectures, and a 28 MW project in the prefecture of Miyagi.
Before the completion of the Oita solar project, the largest solar PV power plant in operation in Japan was the 70 MW Kagushima Nanatsujima PV plant — which itself came online only recently, in November 2013.
In related news, it was only just very recently that the energy arm of GE announced that it will be financially backing a massive 230 MW solar PV power plant being developed in the Japanese city of Setouchi. Once completed, needless to say, that project will then be the largest such solar project in the country.
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Image: Japan flag via Shutterstock
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