Prague Congress Centre will generate electricity from solar panels

The roof of the Prague Congress Centre is currently being filled with solar panels installed by the Czech company Greenbuddies. This is one of the largest rooftop solar power installations in the Czech Republic. ČEZ ESCO is the contracting authority for the project. For Greenbuddies, this is the first construction project on the Czech market. The company brings its extensive experience from building solar power plants and charging infrastructure for electric vehicles in 14 European Union countries.

The roof of the Congress Centre will accommodate over two thousand solar panels, which will have a capacity of almost 1 MW. The installation technicians are moving at a height of 40 m and laying almost 20,000 metres of cables. SolarEdge inverters are used, which minimise the voltage during a fault and are thus suitable for possible firefighting. Modern roof construction technology allows fixing by simply loading, without the need to drill into the roof. Concrete tiles weighing more than 62 tonnes are used for this purpose.

"We have covered all stages of the project, from preparing the project documentation through securing all permits and purchasing components to the construction and commissioning of the supplied technology," says Aleš Spáčil, Sales Director and co-founder of Greenbuddies.

The investor and the contractor consulted with the conservation authorities and the metro administration in the preparation of the construction as part of the permitting process. Issues related to the appearance and visibility of the solar installation on the roof had to be addressed through visualisations and video simulations, and a small sample of the plant had to be built directly on the roof as part of the approval process. Thanks to the constructive and practical approach of the conservationists, the permitting process was successfully completed. As the Congress Centre is partly located in the metro protection zone, the entire project was also approved by the Prague City Transport Company.

The Czech company Greenbuddies is cooperating on this construction with the energy company ČEZ.

Greenbuddies was also selected by this company due to its extensive experience with large rooftop installations abroad, such as in Arnhem in the Netherlands (with an installed capacity of 4.3 MW) or Tilburg (2.8 MW). In the last 5 years, Greenbuddies has completed more than 700 MWp of PV power plants and installed almost 1,750,000 PV modules. Many of its foreign installations have turned unused land and rooftops into modern solar power plants. The company has also built them on a number of brownfield sites, such as a former freight station in Frankfurt, a sunflower oil production site in Cepin in inland Croatia, a waterworks building in Briesen and a clothing sorting plant for the Dutch branch of the Salvation Army in Deventer. It has also given a new dimension to the parking area for 460 cars at the Lutzmannsburg Spa in Austria by installing solar carports.

Greenbuddies is carrying out its first construction in the Czech Republic at the Prague Congress Centre and is continuing with further projects in Mladá Boleslav. In the Ovčáry locality, it is preparing for the investor the valorisation of unused land in the industrial zone of the Kolín car factory. For the developer Accolade, it will build solar power plants on the roofs of eight halls in the Ostrov logistics park near Stříbro, and it is preparing other projects on the roofs of the PENNY discount chain, Ravak and Unipress Turnov, among others.