By Matt Daily, Christoph Steitz and Leonora Walet Reuters Jan
18, 2011(Reuters) – Germany’s fifth-biggest solar power park
emerges as a smudge on the horizon long before you reach it on
the outskirts of the small, sleepy village of Eberswalde, an
hour’s drive north of Berlin. “In the far distance, you can see
it,” Peter Kobbe says, pointing through heavy December snowfall
as he steers his Citroen van along an icy road. Kobbe, 64, works
at Finow airport, where a local investment firm built the 58
million euro ($77 million) solar park in 2009. Finow itself was
built by the Nazis before World War Two and later became one of
the Soviet Union’s main Cold War hubs. Now the small aircraft
that still use the airport share it with about 90,000 solar
modules — which together generate enough to power 6,400
households a year. “This is where they (the Soviets) used to
store their nuclear weapons,” says Kobbe, who runs a small
museum documenting the airport’s history, guiding his van over
the snow-covered landing strip. No