As part of the Inovateus Solar blog, we’ll be giving readers regular updates about some of our solar projects, sharing a few details and photos about the progress.
Between projects already under construction or about to have boots on the ground soon, Inovateus has more than 100 megawatts (MW) of utility, commercial and university solar power plant sites in the works. Several of those projects will be completed by year’s end, including one that’s well on its way to generating clean energy for the grid.
The project, known as Rincon Solar 1, is located on about 96 acres of a former timber farm in Rincon, Georgia, near the coastal city of Savannah. The solar plant will be owned and operated by AES Distributed Energy, which will sell the electricity to Georgia Power under the terms of a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA).
The project is part of the Georgia Power Advanced Solar Initiative (ASI), which will bring hundreds of megawatts of large-scale solar to the utility’s service area. This is the second ASI project that AES and Inovateus have joined forces on; the Dublin Solar Facility was completed in 2015.
In addition to co-developing the project with AES, Inovateus is managing the engineering and procurement for the 21.24 MW-DC (18.36 MW-AC) 1000 V power plant, working alongside our construction partners, Gregory Electric. The Rincon installation features tens of thousands of SolarWorld modules and a smaller amount of Canadian Solar modules integrated on Array Technologies single-axis trackers, with a set of Schneider central inverters performing the power conversion.
A significant feature of the Rincon site is the size of the interconnection. At 230 kVa, the hookup to the utility substation is much larger than that seen in most solar farms—in fact, it could handle a ~400 MW PV system—and will provide Inovateus valuable experience in working with higher-voltage configurations in future projects.
Our team is making excellent progress on the Georgia Power-Rincon job site. Most of the trackers, panels and inverter skids have been installed, and we expect the project to be operational by October.
That’s the status right now. We will be sharing updates on Rincon and our other projects on a regular basis via the Inovateus Solar blog in the coming months, so stay tuned.
By Mauricio Anon, brand ambassador, Inovateus Solar
