Nine-year old Texas solar farm gets an upgrade

A lot has changed in tracker technology in the past decade, so in upgrading its Alamo plants, OCI Solar Power completely replaced the old tracker with a new state-of-the-art system, all while keeping the plant energized.

March 13, 2023 Anne Fischer

Construction of Alamo 1 solar plant outside San Antonio.

image: SRE

Alamo 2 began operating in March 2014, and was originally built with a complex tracker system that moved by way of hydraulic pumps. As mechanical failures become a steady occurrence at both its Alamo 1 and Alamo 2 plants, it was time to upgrade. OCI Solar Power, a utility-scale solar developer based in Texas, served as the EPC to upgrade its 4.4 MW (AC) Alamo 2 solar farm.

The company reached out to Array Technologies, and with some brainstorming, they came up with a plan to remove the old tracker, which was a combination of single- and dual-axis trackers, and replace it with a state-of-the art system. In 2019 they finished upgrading the 39.2 MW (AC) Alamo 1 plant, and the trick to completing it while keeping the plant energized was to swap out the tracker in sections.

Because they were only upgrading the tracker system and keeping the solar panels and electrical balance of system (EBOS), Sabah Bayatli, VP of project development, EPC and Operations, told pv magazine usa that they first removed the panels and EBOS from just one section and stored them until the old tracker was replaced with the new system. Then the panels and EBOS were remounted, and the team moved on to the next section. Working on one section at a time enabled OCI to keep the plant partially energized so that it could continue providing power to CPS Energy, the nation’s largest public power, natural gas, and electric company.

OCI Solar Power is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, and develops, constructs, finances, owns, and operates solar PV facilities, specializing in utility and distributed generation solar projects. The company reports that it developed, designed, procured, and constructed 500 MW in Texas, all of which are operating in the ERCOT maket. In 2016 the company completed the 106 MW (AC) Texas Solar 7 project, the seventh project in the deal that jump-started large-scale solar in Texas.

OCI Solar Power is a subsidiary of OCI Company Ltd., a South Korean firm that has a portfolio of products and solutions for a broad spectrum of industries in the renewable energy sector, including making polysilicon. OCI Company established OCI Enterprises Inc. in 1990, which is its U.S. holding company that is the parent of OCI Solar Power, established in 2012, and Mission Solar Energy, established in 2014.

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