Switzerlands largest PV project

Aldi's Swiss climate ambitions

Supermarket giant, Aldi, aims for their Swiss facilities to soon produce 58% of their own energy on site. In Perlen, they showed how this can be achieved. A rooftop project covering the space of six football pitches was completed using novotegra.

Perlen, Switzerland

Setting the scene

Aldi’s target of generating more than half of their own energy needs was frustrated back in 2016. Construction of their new Perlen site was meant to incorporate roof-mounted solar panels, but a change in energy policy made this unviable at the time. novotegra were contacted to help correct this oversight by mounting thousands of photovoltaic modules atop this enormous logistics centre.

Meeting the challenges

As well as being Switzerland’s biggest rooftop photovoltaics project, this was also the largest ever project planned using our Solar-Planit software. The building’s low roof load reserve called for a specialist mounting solution, a version of our east-west II system. The building itself covers 44,500m², requiring over 20,000 individual solar panels to be mounted and connected with 500km of solar cabling.

The result

Amazingly, the whole project was completed in under 16 weeks. The site is now capable of generating 6,427,52 kWp. That’s enough to power 2,150 homes. 25 % of that energy is consumed on site. The remaining three quarters are sold back to the local energy grid, driving more income for Aldi. The future is bright for this partnership with novotegra. The aim is for 40 % of Aldi’s Swiss branches to soon host photovoltaic modules, meaning around 80 new projects. Each branch is scheduled to produce between 130-260kW, used primarily to power the sites themselves.

Interfering objects, maintenance corridors and a low roof load reserve are no particular challenges for our Flat Roof II System East/West. So we were also able to profitably use this beautiful company building for our environment.

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