Austria's Activ Solar has announced the completion and commissioning of one of the world's largest solar photovoltaic plants, the 100-megawatt (MW) Perovo Solar Power Station in Ukraine's Crimea. Built in record-setting time, Perovo's more than 440,000 crystalline solar PV modules can produce as much as 132,500 megawatt-hours (MWh) of clean, renewable electrical energy per year, enough to meet the needs of Simferopol, the Ukraine Crimea capital.

More than 105,000 tons of carbon emissions will be avoided.

Building Perovo has also boosted the local economy. More than 800 green jobs were created. Spanning some 200 hectares (~494 acres), about 259 football fields, solar PV modules and inverters were imported from leading Asian and European manufacturers and installed on-site by local workers. Nearly a mile (1500 kilometers) of cable was used to connect them over a record-setting seven-month period.

"The completion of the Perovo project is a major achievement for Activ Solar as our largest to-date and is a testament to our structuring and execution capabilities in a challenging global economic environment," Kaveh Ertefai, Vienna-based Activ Solar's founder and CEO, commented in a company news release.

"We are proud of the quality of the work accomplished and the dedication of our team to deliver this successful outcome within a short period of time."

Perovo is the third ground-breaking project the company's completed in 2011. In October, it launched the 80-MW Ohotnikovo Solar Power Station, the largest in Central and Eastern Europe. Activ sees more solar power potential in the Crimea.

It's recently established in Odessa, an outgrowth of its strategic focus on "emerging solar markets."

Activ is an integrated solar PV industry company. In addition to developing large-scale solar PV projects, it has produced silicon products since 1964. It produces solar-grade polysilicon ingots, wafers and solar PV cells at its subsidiary PJSC Semiconductor Plant in Zaporozhye, Ukraine.