Poland: solar panels installed on the roofs of blocks . Results? Better than expected.

Last year, over 2,700 photovoltaic panels were installed on the roofs of Wrocław(Western Poland) blocks of flats. The panels were to reduce the emission of CO2 to the atmosphere by 557 tons. But it turned out that the results were better than predictions. They reduced it by 600 tons! That’s as much pollution as 50,000 trees can absorb in one year. Such a forest would have over 150 hectares!

The first summary proves that such solar plants should be built on other Polish blocks of flats. Wrocław’s blocks of flats have a good reputation lately. The media have just written about the iconic buildings called ‘toilet seats’ located near the city center. A 5-meter model of these buildings was shown at the exhibition in the New York gallery Center for Architecture.

The Wrocław-Południe Housing Cooperative installed 2771 solar panels on the roofs of 35 high-rise buildings. They occupied a total of 0.5 hectare area, and the total power of the entire installation was 739 kWp. This is how the largest municipal, distributed solar power plant in Poland was created. It provides energy to elevators, provides lighting in the corridors, as well as on the street. So, more than 15,000 inhabitants use solar energy. The project was financed by the Voivodship Fund for Environmental Protection and Water Management under the “Prosument” program.

Loans taken for the panels will be repaid in six years. Then, the charges for residents for electricity in corridors, elevators and streets will decrease on average by about 75 percent – predicts Mirosław Lach, one of the originators of Wrocław Solar Power Plant

Currently, the cooperative’s authorities plan to expand the project and further ecological projects. For example, they want to run heat pumps that will cooperate with the panels and produce thermal energy to heat the water.