A covered walkway between the terminal and tarmac at Groningen Airport Eelde will help to shield passengers from the elements. The walkway will have solar panels on its roof, which will be part of a wider array of panels set to be built at the airport this spring.
Translation by Traci White
Currently, passengers at the airport have to walk several hundred meters from the terminal to the aircraft on the tarmac, which is especially unpleasant in the rain.
Dagblad van het Noorden reports that the covered walkway will have solar panels installed on its roof to supply electricity for the airport. The panels on the walkway are part of a larger network of panels that are set to be installed at Eelde this spring.
The majority of the panels – 77,000 of them – will be put in place between the old runway and the new runway, and will be the first solar park at an airport in the Netherlands. The panels have reportedly been chosen to ensure that they will not impact the flights coming in and out of the airport.
Construction on the walkway and the panels should begin in April and is set to be completed later in the summer. A Heerenveen company called GroenLeven will be building and operating the solar farm which will have a capacity of 22 megawatts, which should be enough to provide electricity of 5,550 homes.
Despite growing grid capacity issues in Groningen and Drenthe, GroenLeven says that they do not think they will have any problems distributing the electricity generated by the Eelde array.
Photo source: GroenLeven
