Watson Farley & Williams (“WFW”) has advised enercity Erneuerbare GmbH (“enercity”) on a cooperation agreement with local company Forst Rohne to build a wind farm in the Görlitz area of Germany’s Saxony region.

The project will be realised in two construction phases. In the first, four turbines with a total capacity of 24 MW will be built in an area suitable for wind energy. The second phase will see the installation of a further 29 turbines with a total capacity of 174 MW. When fully operational, the project will generate 540m kWh of green energy annually, enough to power over 155,000 households.

Extensive areas of commercial forest such as Görlitz hold great potential for wind turbines due to their distance from residential buildings and for their ability to limit the visibility of turbines in the landscape. Almost half of Germany’s 11.4m hectares of forest are unimproved commercial forests and of this less than 1000 hectares are currently equipped with wind turbines. A wind turbine with a capacity of 5 MW requires around one hectare of forest area and generates around 16m kWh of electricity, saving 6,400 tonnes of CO2 per year. To compensate for the building of such wind turbines, enercity always ensures to plant more ecologically valuable forests that are more resilient to climate changes than the previous commercial forest it utilised.

enercity is a provider of sustainable and intelligent energy solutions in Germany, offering a range of energy-related services including e-mobility, telecommunications and infrastructure. For enercity, this project is the next step towards its goal of having 1GW of wind energy capacity in operation by 2025.

The WFW Germany Energy team that advised enercity was led by Partner and Düsseldorf Office Head Dr Thorsten Volz, assisted by Of Counsel Dr Christoph Benedict and Managing Associate Britta Wißmann. Hamburg Partner Gerrit Bartsch provided tax advice.

Thorsten commented: “I am delighted to have advised enercity on another project with ambitious sustainability aims. This deal highlights WFW’s reputation as a market leader in both the German energy sector and the renewable energy space generally”.