At the end of 2018, there were 690 ground mounted utility-scale solar power plants totaling greater than 25GWac in commercial operation in the United States. These projects represented tens of billions of dollars of installation costs and hundreds of millions of ongoing annual operations and maintenance work.
And now, a $20 billion revenue stream is arising — upgrades of racking, inverters, and solar modules that maximize the amount of electricity that can be delivered through already existing interconnection approvals.
OCI Solar Power has repowered a portion of its 39.2MWac/49.4MWdc Alamo 1 solar power plant in Bexar County, Texas. The plant has been upgraded to Array Technologies trackers and bifacial solar modules. Existing inverters, manufactured by Kaco New Energy, concrete foundations, and balance of system gear were left in place.
The facility came online in December of 2013, and sits on 445 acres of land on the southside of San Antonio. Originally, the plant was built with 167,680 Yingli solar modules, 295 watts each, on 2,260 single-axis and 1,932 dual-axis trackers manufactured by ERCAM Trackers.
Image: pv magazine
The work took nine months to complete. Jason Thompson, Construction Manager for OCI, said the new block of trackers and bifacial modules “will be used for field testing and data-gathering.”
RES Americas Inc. was the original engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firm, with Swinerton Renewable being contracted for the recent work.
In August of 2016, the facility added 1MW/250KWh of energy storage to provide fast response frequency stability.
Inverter manufacturer SMA launched its SMA Repowering department in January of 2019 where it offers engineering services to support system upgrades of this nature. Spanish company TSO recently patented drone based O&M software that supports repowering in its O&M algorithms. The older European solar market has been talking about repowering for a few years now, with 40GW of solar power plants greater than 100kW and older than five years of age.
Hardware manufacturer Alencon makes a piece of hardware that allows for upgrades of this nature called the “String Power Optimizers and Transmitters” (SPOT for short). It allows for connection of hardware with varying voltages to each other, easing the upgrade process. Alencon also offers an engineering service surrounding the repowering, a very different process from the original design route.
Modules and racking aren’t the only upgrades. In 2018, almost half of the utility scale solar + energy storage installations were energy storage upgrades to already existing solar plants.
OCI claimed it was able to do the upgrades without powering down the whole of the facility, and that due to the success of this upgrade they’re now looking for new facilities to similarly redevelop.
Here’s a clip of the original panels being installed.
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Interesting! Are the older panels reused and where?
The panels are less than ten years old, so they would have some resale value. There would be no point in throwing them away.
How can I been participate with you people
I find it interesting that solar PV plants are ‘easily’ upgradable or in this case can be retrofitted partially to see how new technologies actually perform and age in the field. It’s this kind of action that can make the technology more effective than having to do things like, replace boilers and generation in an old coal fired plant with new natural gas boilers and or generation turbines. Depending on whose bifacial panel technology one can expect a change from the reported 295 watt panels to something in the neighborhood of 345 watts of bifacial solar PV output. Canadian Solar is advertising bifacial panels in the 400 watt range. Panasonic and others are pursuing bifacial panels in the 400 watt range.
The article mentions the “addition” of energy storage to existing solar PV farms. Do you think that this will be the trend for the next decade or so? The latest ‘thing’ seems to be ‘clipping’, installing 1.3 to maybe 2 times the solar PV required to drive the inverters, then later on, installing energy storage to capture the ‘clipping’ to use later on in the day or even at night? This pretty much ‘solid state’ generation technology seems more flexible than the old fueled mechanical generation technologies of the past. Spinning reserve and spinning demand are one and the same with energy storage and can be dynamically turned on in milliseconds to seconds, no need to burn fuel, just in case the grid demand increases.
There is a promising generation scheme that will also do carbon dioxide removal.
It was a 4 component concept and I believe it was explained on YouTube.
It is actually first polish performance, I have an opportunity to build a pilot solar off-grid with solar plant
and micro-grid applications on area within 100, 000 Sq m at mafraq /Jordan. I am going to used all required equipment typical to the equipment had been mentioned in the article, we are at preparing
feasible study phase to the above pilot project -Which will be finalized by IFC /Jordan .
The aim of project is to exportation power from Jordan to Iraq via energy storage systems, and micro grid applications instead of conventional transmission and distribution grid.
So All pertinent parties are welcome to contribute on business base in the project.
Very interesting . May i know how the old modules were disposed off , as i would expect they have a resale value so it cant be discarded. If re-powering is going to be the trend , i would to see it accompanied by sustainable disposal of replaced components as well.
There are companies out there that buy up these panels and resell them at very reduced costs….
I learned that Germany uses sheep, not goats to mow underneath the panels. Goats eat wires and like to climb on things, sheep do not.
in the uae we use camels