The first solar power generating plant in Russia will be built close to the Black Sea, according to a press statement on the web site of Rusnano, one of the joint participants in the venture.
The Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies, headed by the nation’s former Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, said in the statement that the plant, with a total output of 12.3 megawatts, will be built at Kislovodsk Spa in the Stavropol region in the south of the country.
The agreement to build the photovoltaic plant was signed at the International Forum on Nanotechnology in Moscow on Nov. 2 by the government of the Stavropol region and Khevel, the joint venture established for the project by Rusnano and Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova Group, the statement said Friday.
The plant could be completed in 2012, Khevel’s general director Yevgeny Zagorodny said at the forum, according to minutes of the meeting published on the event’s web site.
The plant will be equipped with wafer-thin micromorphic solar cells developed by the Oerlikon Solar Company of Switzerland and manufactured under license at the Khevel plant at Novocheboksarsk. The city is located in the Chuvashia republic, close to Nizhny Novgorod.
The Novocheboksarsk solar cell manufacturing plant, with an annual output of more than 1 million solar modules, is being developed by Khevel within the framework of the joint venture, the statement said.
The project was established between Rusnano, which will have 49 percent, and Renova, with 51 percent. It will have investment of 20.1 billion rubles (658.1 million dollars), Rusnano said.
Rusnano’s managing director Sergei Polikarpov said in the statement that when the solar cell manufacturing plant deal was being signed last year, the output had been intended for exports. Now, with the country’s first PV plant being developed, some of its output will also generate electricity in Russia.
Chubais said at the conference that the PV plant project is a “breakthrough into a different dimension” for his nanotechnology company, according to the forum’s web site.
