Csurgó lies at the crossroads of the romantic forests of Inner Somogy, the Zala Hills and the Drava region. The Astrasun group took care of a less romantic part of the romantic landscape, its former, recultivated landfill, to generate clean energy at the waste site.
At present, three solar power plants with a capacity of 499 kWp each in Csurgó are diligently converting the sunrays into electricity - after a one-year test operation, the company handed over the solar park on October 2., 2020. The solar plant is a pilot project in the life of the company in several respects, as all the challenges of the legacy of the landfill had to be tackled during the construction.
The exemplary investment was also praised by Tamás Schanda, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Innovation and Technology, László Szászfalvi, Member of Parliament for the region, and János Füstös, Mayor of Csurgó, at the inauguration of the solar park and the related press conference.
Unique developments
When building a solar park, the general aim is not to take away land from agricultural cultivation – however, nowadays it is already certain that the land unsuitable for agriculture can be rehabilitated by a solar power plant and used again for agricultural work! An earlier landfill, covered with a layer of about a meter thick soil, for example, is understandably unsuitable for farming, but even construction in the classical sense is out of the question. In spite of this, ASTRASUN took the risk: it bought the area with unstable, lightly loadable soil and started building a solar park.
Extra investment, greater efficiency
The structure of the soil made traditional piling - which is used to securely fasten structures supporting solar panels - completely impossible, therefore, a method of fastening specifically tailored to the field had to be developed instead. For five months, Astrasun experimented to find the ideal technical solution, which involved additional costs, but – along with involving additional resources - this was offset by the inclusion of an in-house, manually adjustable solar tracking system. As a result, the power plant was implemented at a higher cost than originally planned, but in return it operates more efficiently, thus producing more. As for the static reliability of the supporting structure: the solar park was put to a test by the weather in a variety of ways: within one year, it was affected by several weather phenomena, ranging from torrential rain through severe frosts to gusts above 100 km / h, still it remained stable in an exemplary way.
