As the year is coming to an end, Conergy has won a further major contract in Thailand, continuing its string of successes in Asia in spite of the recent flooding in the country. The 9 megawatt solar park in Pak Thong Chai in the province of Nakhon Ratchasima some 250 kilometres northeast of Bangkok is already Conergy’s fourth solar park in the country. Back in April the solar experts had secured a major contract for a 12.4 megawatt solar plant in Nakhon Pathom, four hours away, and now a further large-scale project is following in the same region on behalf of local investor CH. Karnchang Public Company Limited.
In this project, Conergy is responsible both for the planning, engineering and for supplying the components for the 79,000 square metre park. The solar experts are also acting as general contractor. In cooperation with local partner Ensys Co. Ltd, Conergy will be installing over 64,000 thin-film modules on 120 kilometres of Conergy SolarLinea mounting systems. 27 Conergy IPG 300C inverters in Conergy CIS central inverter stations will be feeding around 13,000 megawatt hours of clean energy into the Thai grid on completion of the project this coming summer.The plant will thus supply enough power for around 4,000 households and prevent the release of some 7,000 tons of damaging CO2 emissions in the kingdom each year.
“All around the world, ongoing climate change is increasingly entailing natural disasters, as has happened recently in Thailand,” says Alexander Lenz, President Southeast Asia & Middle East at Conergy. “These floods represented a great challenge for us – a challenge, however, that we have mastered and that is not stopping us from building further solar parks here. On the contrary. There is hardly a more convincing argument than these floods for solar as a sustainable and clean form of energy. Moreover, thanks to the comprehensive worry-free insurance, the investors of the existing parks have been protected against such flooding damages as well as the resulting interruption of the energy production.”
Conergy will therefore continue to forge ahead with its business in Southeast Asia and Thailand, where it sees great growth potential. The Thai government has already initiated the move towards sustainable energy and plans to have achieved a solar market volume totalling 500 megawatts of installed capacity by 2020. Contrary to developments in many European solar markets, the Thai energy authority has announced that it wants to review the existing support for solar “positively”: In future, small plants on private houses might possibly also benefit from the state-guaranteed feed-in tariffs besides the large solar plants – a promising outlook for the Asian Conergy team, which saw its sales increase by more than 60% in the first nine months of 2011.
“I’m very proud of our Southeast Asia Team,” says Marc Lohoff, Corporate Vice President and President for Conergy Asia Pacific & Middle East. “The fact that they managed to secure this major order in spite of the unfortunate events in the country due to recent flood illustrates our strong position in this region – as well as in India, Australia and the Middle East. Our customers trust in our top-quality solutions and our knowhow, because they know that we realise highly efficient systems even in the most difficult environments and can even provide insurance if appropriate.”
