Arizona solar project to test five different PV technologies

A five-megawatt solar power project making use of five different solar technologies is due to go live next month in Yuma, Arizona.

The project at Arizona Western College will serve as a state of the art research and testing site for government and corporate solar applications.

The installation across the community college campus consists of five distinct photovoltaic technologies including; mono crystalline, poly crystalline, low concentration, high concentration, and thin film.

Boston-based power conversion specialist Satcon Technology Corporation (NASDAQ CM: SATC) has now delivered five megawatts (MW) of its industry-leading PowerGate Plus and Solstice systems for the project.

The PowerGate Plus system is the world’s most widely deployed large-scale, Utility-Ready solution, the company said.

Satcon Solstice leverages string level power conversion and energy harvest optimization that is integrated as a complete system with a highly optimized centralized inverter.

All of Satcon’s solutions include advanced utility-ready features to enable simplified grid interconnection and can be easily integrated into SCADA systems through standardized communication interfaces, it said.

When it is switched on, Satcon said the Yuma site will have an anticipated energy output of 10,500,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per year, equivalent to the annual consumption of 879 households in Yuma Arizona.

The Arizona Western College campus has been a site of interest to the U.S. Department of Energy ever since it brought on line a 105.6 kilowatt rooftop array in 2009, which is not only used for classes locally but also available online at no cost to K-20 educators all over the world.

Yuma’s unique climate – including an extremely high rate of solar irradiation, designation by the Guinness Book of World Records as the sunniest city on earth, with an annual sunshine rate of 90% – make this part of the country ideal for solar development .

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