10 MW Solar Park

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mellow

mellow

Resident Stove Connoisseur
Hearth Supporter
Jan 19, 2008
5,992
Salisbury, MD
Pretty cool setup just put online up in Dover, DE. That is a HUGE amount of panels.

Gonna take a motorcycle ride up and get a tour.

http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2012/aug/Solar-Park-081711.html

(broken link removed to http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/archive/2011/august/beitrag/10-mw-dover-sun-park-dedicated_100003920/)
 

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Enen better, how about that COVERING mall parking lots? Mall leases out space to the energy company, cars are under cover and kept cooler and out of the sun.

Just have to keep all the idiots and morons from driving into the posts holding the panels up.
 
Jags said:
That is cool. I would rather see that then mall parking lots.
Click to expand...

That's awesome. I'd also like to see this, raised as a roof over mall parking lots. No need to make it watertight. But it would keep the lot cooler and would generate a lot of electricity.
 
Good idea, poor execution. What a waste of what looks like good farmland. If it is over a brownfield or something like that ok, but I would rather see them in dual purpose use, like the mall parking idea. Solar PV on roofs makes sense, take some of the energy that is hitting the roof and convert it to electricity instead. I know it is cheaper to build on vacant land right now, but we will regret it in the future.
 
Solar panels as a cover over an underlying land use is a great idea. Parking lots would be ideal. I suspect one barrier to doing this might be lack of electric transmission infrastructure to absorb the output.

A very small implementation of this concept was just installed at Deep Portage, an educational institution near me. It installed (into operation just 2 days ago) a grid-connected 7 kwh array mounted above ground to allow an outdoor classroom underneath. Plus, the solar cells respond to light from both sides, so the ground cover underneath will be white for reflectivity, increasing output by as much as 30%. As a practical matter, Deep Portage uses more than 7 kwh of electricity in normal operation, so 100% of the output will be used onsite, which also delivers the biggest bang for the buck through reduction of grid electricity use (saving about $0.10/kwh), while sale back to the grid provides only about $0.03/kwh. Clearly, if this applies generally, private install of solar normally would be optimal only where all the electricity produced would be consumed onsite.

I recently installed a power monitor on our home electric meter. Daytime electric use seems to be about 0.5 to 0.7 kwh as baseline use. If we did grid-tied solar at home, it seems we might not want to have capacity more than about 1 kwh to maximize savings.
 
Any brand name on that power monitor, cost?
Thanks Jim
Ed
 
RREAL got the bid and did the install. It should be able to provide you with excellent information. This is a great local outfit and I know the people there quite well.
 
Thanks again Jim. I see that they have a dealer in Greenfield, Ma. not too far from me. I'll check them out.
Ed
 
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