We are very proud that our first Ukrainian employee, Kateryna joined our team. We had been helping Kateryna since the first hours of her arrival in Vienna in March, offering a place for temporary residence to help her get started in Vienna. After receiving all required permits, she joined our team as a Communication Specialist. Kateryna is from Odesa, Ukraine and arrived in Austria in early March. Kateryna’s story is a vivid example of how we have transformed our approach to helping Ukrainians. Starting from providing short-term accommodation, we soon expanded our activity to administrative and visa support. Now the Enery Support Package also includes job offers in our company and the possibility to receive a scholarship. We have so far supported almost 50 people with accommodation and admin support and have provided food in Slovakia for over 100 schoolkids.

In our efforts to enhance pollinator habitats and mitigate their overall decline, we decided to trial a bee project at our Karadzhalovo power plant in the Thracia region of Bulgaria. With some help from external bee and vegetation experts and one of our plant workers, Nedyalko Dyalkov, who happens to be a beekeeper in his spare time, our innovative team in Bulgaria has now managed to introduce various bee families at the solar park and plant a pollinator friendly garden, so our newest ‘workers’ have a clean food supply nearby. As a nice side effect, we already have produced our first honey and also our ‘first solar honey rakija’ from Karadzhalovo this year.

Humankind is currently facing two important issues related to nature degradation and global food production – lack of usable land and rapid decline of pollinators. We decided to focus our efforts on multiple land use and pollinator support. In 2021, we have successfully executed two projects. Photovoltaic power plants in some of the communities we operate in carry negative connotation as they are perceived to take up land that could otherwise be used for agriculture. To mitigate this, we try to only develop land with low agricultural rating but also started looking at various options for multipurpose land use initiatives to implement at our sites. Together with an experienced local farmer, our Czech team has now successfully executed a project where we introduced sheep to replace conventional vegetation control techniques and double the purpose of the land, we occupy at our Určice power plant in Moravia.

#wedotherightthingsright and will keep you posted about our new ventures in 2022