Unfortunate Solar Installation of the Month: Utility-Scale Edition

Adventures in lousy O&M. Or a mid-development bankruptcy. This month’s winner is a seemingly neglected utility-scale solar farm in Germany.

Eric Wesoff April 30, 2012

Eric Wesoff

Editor-at-Large
Greentech Media

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

It's hard to know what to make of this weed-ridden solar installation photo by Knut Loschke taken in June of last year.

It's a photo of a solar farm near Markranstädt, Germany. The photo was used by an anti-solar group to show the folly of solar.

Ed Gunther suggests that perhaps "someone went bankrupt or did not get a O&M contract," although it's "hard to imagine why anyone would allow this with feed-in tariffs."

Readers are welcome to caption this photo or suggest just what is going on in this picture: