Work will begin on Thursday on what will be the Netherlands’s largest solar farm in Nieuw-Buinen in Drenthe, local broadcaster RTV Drenthe reports.

The project, covering 100 hectares and with 300,000 panels, is a joint initiative between local construction company Avitec and solar park builders Solarfields from Groningen.

Production has been estimated at 120 megawatts, enough for some 30,000 households.

The solar farm, which will cost €80m, will not the be the largest for long, as bigger farms are under development, including one in Flevoland, Jelmer Pijlman of Solarfields told the broadcaster.

The land used for the solar farm is provided by local potato starch producer Avebe and Avitec. ‘That means the Avebe can continue to use the water basins and we can produce sustainable energy at the same time,’ Pijlman said. The electricity produced will be fed into the Enexis network via an existing cable belonging to Avebe.

There has been no local opposition to the arrival of the farm, which Pijlman said, is a result of careful procedural planning and proper communication with the local population and the authorities.

The first households should be running on solar energy from the farm in about a year, Pijlman said.