Cheap land is the first thing any utility-scale solar developer goes hunting for, and the usual finds are deserts, capped landfills and farmland too tired to grow anything worth selling. Eastern Germany has a stranger option. The region is dotted with former Soviet training grounds where the dirt still holds live ammunition, so nobody can plow it, build on it, or in some places even walk across it off the marked paths. The ground just sits there, priced like the problem it is.<\/p>\n
Over the past two decades, solar has become the one industry willing to move onto that ground. Photovoltaics is the rare business that only ever needs the surface. A bomb-disposal technician clears the row, a crew plants posts behind him, and whatever stayed deep in the dirt gets to stay there. Three German plants show how far that logic can be pushed, and a forest fire last month showed exactly what happens on the ground nobody has swept yet.<\/p>\n
Germany digs up more than 2,000 tons of unexploded munitions every year, most of it left over from World War II, according to Smithsonian Magazine<\/a>. Before any construction project starts, from a home extension to new rail track, the ground has to be certified clear of ordnance. That is the baseline for the whole country.<\/p>\n The former East Germany carries a second layer on top of it. When the Soviet Union’s Western Group of Forces packed up and left in the early 1990s, it walked away from bases, airfields and firing ranges scattered across the new eastern states. In 1993 the federal government offered to take those properties over from the states, clean them up and sell them on, per the German Environment Agency<\/a>. Some thirty years later, plenty of that ground has still never been touched.<\/p>\n Which creates a very specific real estate niche. Land that is flat, empty, sunny by German standards, and priced with a discount that reflects what is buried in it. Farmers can’t run a plow through soil seeded with tank shells. Home builders can’t dig a basement in it. There is exactly one industry that can use it more or less as-is.<\/p>\n About 60 miles southeast of Berlin sits the Lieberoser Heide, once the largest Soviet military training ground in Germany. A 1942 forest fire stripped a patch of it bare, and decades of exercises kept anything from growing back, leaving roughly five square kilometers of open sand that Germans call the country’s only desert. Locals nicknamed it Little Siberia. Hikers today are told to stay on marked paths, because the ordnance never left.<\/p>\n Hundreds of thousands of soldiers trained there over the decades, running live-fire tank exercises and, at one point, chemical warfare drills. The Soviets pulled out in the 1990s and the land passed to the state of Brandenburg in 1997, which then owned a vast stretch of poisoned, shell-riddled heath and had no obvious takers.<\/p>\n The taker that eventually showed up was a solar developer, and the structure of the deal is the interesting part. The site went to the project under a lease, and according to the project’s own materials<\/a>, that lease payment to Brandenburg financed the restoration of the ground, including hauling out the grenades, shrapnel and contaminated soil the tenants before them left behind. Academic work on the site describes it the same way: parts of the heath were leased to an investor in return for clearing the mines, weapons and toxins out of the dirt. The rent, functionally, was bomb disposal.<\/p>\n What went up on the cleared section opened in August 2009 as the largest solar plant in Germany and the second-largest in the world at the time. Just under 53 megawatts across 162 hectares, a shade over 400 acres, carrying roughly 700,000 thin-film modules, most of them produced at First Solar’s factory in Frankfurt an der Oder about an hour up the road. Enough output for around 15,000 households, generated on ground where the previous occupant practiced for World War III.<\/p>\n Lieberose was the headline act, but the pattern repeats across the east. In 2012, the 52.284-megawatt Walddrehna Solar Park went live on another former military site in Brandenburg, sized for about 15,000 households. In Saxony, the Rote Jahne Solar Park put 90,000 First Solar thin-film modules on roughly 6.7 hectares of a former military airfield back in 2007, a 6-megawatt plant on ground that used to launch warplanes.<\/p>\n The reason solar keeps winning these sites comes down to what the construction actually touches. A ground-mounted array is mostly steel posts driven a few feet down at surveyed points, each one checked before anything gets hammered. No foundations, no basements, no plowing, no irrigation trenches. The sappers work a strip, the pile driver follows the sappers, and the panels follow the pile driver.<\/p>\n We covered the American cousin of this problem just the other week: a 52-megawatt solar farm on a Houston landfill<\/a> where crews can’t drive a single pile because it would puncture the membrane sealing the garbage below. Same constraint, different monster. In Houston the ground must not be pierced or it leaks. In Brandenburg the ground must barely be pierced or it detonates. Both times, solar turned out to be the only tenant light-footed enough to sign the lease. It keeps happening: in Oregon, a developer agreed to leave a 600-foot elk corridor through the middle of a 406,000-panel array<\/a> to win approval. Solar keeps ending up on the land that comes with homework.<\/p>\n If you want to know what the unswept version of this ground looks like, Germany ran the demonstration in July. A wildfire broke out on July 13 inside M\u00fcritz National Park in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, on and around a former military training area, and firefighters were not allowed anywhere near the flames. Old munitions in the soil forced crews to hold a minimum distance of 1,000 meters, about 3,300 feet, according to district officials<\/a> quoted by the South China Morning Post.<\/p>\n “Emergency services cannot actively put out the fire, that is the problem,” district spokesman Marten Schroeder said, adding that even helicopters couldn’t drop water accurately from the altitude that the safety distance imposed. Officials noted large-caliber rounds remain in the area, and anti-tank grenades have been found there in the past. Heat from the fire reportedly set some of it off.<\/p>\n So around 370 firefighters, police and soldiers spent days containing roughly 388 hectares from the outside, wetting the edges and waiting, while villages like Granzin were evacuated more than once. The Bundeswehr sent two CH-53 transport helicopters with external water tanks after the district formally asked for help on July 15. Direct attack stayed limited to the parts of the site not suspected of holding ordnance.<\/p>\n That is the price of leaving this ground as it is. And Germany has form on entombed problems generally. We have already looked at the 126,000 drums of nuclear waste sitting in a collapsing German salt mine<\/a>, waiting decades for a machine that can safely pull them back out. The pattern holds: burying the problem is fast, and un-burying it is somebody else’s career.<\/p>\n Germany ended 2025 with 117 gigawatts of installed solar, per the Bundesnetzagentur<\/a>, and the total passed 121 gigawatts in the first quarter of 2026. The old Soviet ranges contributed a small but symbolically loud slice of that, ground that produced nothing but hazard warnings for decades and now produces electricity.<\/p>\n Here is the wrinkle nobody saw coming in 2009. Germany is rearming, and its defense ministry reportedly suspended the conversion of former military land to civilian use last year, a freeze covering 187 former properties, while officials evaluate returning some sites to the Bundeswehr. As of June 2026, 174 former military sites were under review<\/a> and five bases are already being reactivated for new recruits.<\/p>\n For three decades the sequence was simple. The army left, the sappers swept, the panels moved in, and everyone got paid. Existing plants like Lieberose sit on long leases and keep producing regardless. But the supply of walkaway military land, the strange discounted asset class that built them, is no longer guaranteed to keep flowing in one direction. The landlord who created the whole niche is back at the door. And this time he isn’t leaving anything behind. He’s moving back in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cheap land is the first thing any utility-scale solar developer goes hunting for, and the usual finds are deserts, capped … <\/p>\nLieberose paid its rent in bomb disposal<\/h2>\n
Walddrehna and Rote Jahne ran the same play<\/h2>\n
A fire last month showed the alternative<\/h2>\n
The landlord wants some of it back<\/h2>\n