Solar Panels, 800.292.7648
• 2008-Apr-9 - Roof Top Solar Panels Commercial Buildings
The idea may not be original, but it has an elegant obviousness: why not use some of the many industrial rooftops in the sprawling southern California megalopolis as sites for megawatt-level, solar-powered electricity-generating plants? The scale of the recently announced Southern California Edison (SCE) project, however, is unprecedented, dwarfing that of any comparable plans, such as Colexon Energy's deployment of First Solar and other PV modules on rooftops of chicken farms and other commercial structures in Germany.
The utility company plans to build 250-MW worth of these stations over the next five years, adding a megawatt of installed power each month on between 100 and 200 leased warehouse roofs, at a total cost of $875 million. Once it's completed, photovoltaic panels will cover nearly 65 million square feet, or two square miles' worth of rooftop real estate, and provide enough juice for about 162,000 homes.
Grid-connected solar utility installations of this magnitude usually use thermal or concentrator technologies to turns the sun's rays and heat into power, are mostly located in the desert or other sparsely inhabited areas, and require substations and miles of power lines to bring the juice back to where it's needed. For example, a day before the SCE announcement, FPL Energy aired its plans to start building a 250-MW solar power plant next year in the Mojave Desert of California, which will use rows of some 500,000 parabolic mirrors to concentrate the sun's energy to produce steam for turbine generators. |
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