Gottfried Jais says the 2,600 solar panel array on a gravel lake near Gilching in Bavaria fits the site because it takes no land. The vertical floating plant went live on the grid on August 21 last year, turning a working gravel pit into a power source for the property itself.
SINN Power’s 2,600-panel setup
SINN Power built the plant with a rated capacity of 1.87 megawatts, and it is expected to produce roughly 2 gigawatt-hours a year. That scale is aimed at a single industrial user rather than broad export, because most of the electricity never leaves the property.
The lake belongs to Kies- und Quetschwerk Jais, and Jais is a co-investor in the project. He said the arrangement “does not require any land and adapts perfectly to our production plant,” which is the practical payoff for a gravel business that runs crushers, conveyors and pumps from the same site.
Bavaria’s floating-solar rule
The unusual part is the layout. The panels stand upright on floating structures, and each float carries a keel-like structure hanging up to 5.2 feet, or 1.6 meters, below the surface. The rows sit at least 13 feet, or 4 meters, apart in open water corridors, so the system can stay vertical without the panels shading one another too much.
That spacing tracks with the legal limit that shaped the project, since the design was built to fit a rule on how much of a lake may be shaded. The rows are built to stand upright like sails on water, but they are meant to lean under wind load instead of fighting it with a rigid steel frame.
August 21 to October 10
The timeline matters because the plant was not just announced and left on paper. It went live on August 21 last year, and the project had its ribbon cut on October 10 last year, after Bavaria’s Minister-President Markus Söder visited the site on a boat.
The remaining question is the exact legal wording behind the lake-shading limit that forced the vertical layout. For operators watching this project, that rule is the part that decides whether this kind of floating solar can spread to other gravel lakes or stays a one-off engineering answer to one site.
