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Why aren’t more solar production plants powered by solar energy? Although it’s not uncommon for solar cell and module companies to have some panels operating onsite, atop the roof or bolted to ground-mounted racks, they’re usually smallish test arrays, of no more than a few kilowatts, not serious power systems providing a significant chunk of the electricity needs of the plant.

Nothing says “sustainability” like clean and green products manufactured using renewable power, not to mention the benefits for a company’s carbon footprint and energy payback time stats. That’s why the news of a couple more manufacturers plugging in decent-sized PV systems on their own factories provides a modest pretext to be thankful.

Centrosolar has hooked up a 300KW system on the roof of its warehouse and soon-to-be-150MW capacity module factory in Wismar, Germany (see photo above). The 41 rows of 1565 crystalline-silicon modules, all assembled directly below where they are installed, cover some 11,000 square meters and will provide at least 10% of annual energy requirements.

The homegrown modules are not the only aspect of this Centrosolar family affair. Company unit Renusol supplied the fastening system to attach the panels to the array racking, and the inverters turning the DC into AC come from Powerstocc (another branch of the corporate tree). All in, the system should produce more than 276,000 KWh of juice per annum.

Over in Obenburg am Main in Lower Franconia, another German company with solar ties recently had 4445 panels deployed on its roof. Reis Robotics, which supplies a fair amount of automation gear and turnkey moduling lines to the PV sector, now sports a 1MW system installed by Isofoton (see photo below), who happens to be a Reis customer as well. It is also the Spanish outfit’s first major rooftop project done in Germany.

(I wonder if the company will put a few thousand of its own modules on top of the 60MW panel factory, equipped with a Reis line, set to be built in Ohio next year?)

The last batches of Isofoton modules are being installed for the 8000 square meter system, which will be connected to the grid later this month and be up and running by year’s end, according to the partners. Once humming, the power plant will provide about 870,000 KWh of electricity annually.

Other PV-oriented manufacturing companies already grabbing electrons from ol’ Sol—or planning to enter the unbroken-circle distributed-generation PV fray soon--include Applied Materials and its ~2MW of panels located in several locations on its Northern California campuses, and Sharp Solar, which has an ambitious scheme to put as many as 18MW of PV on the rooftops of its new 1GW thin-film megafactory set to open next year in Sakai City, Japan. 

One of the largest copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide (CIGS) power systems on the planet sits across the parking lot from the one of the largest CIGS factories—Global Solar’s Tucson HQ plant. The 750KW array of Solon modules strung with Global flex cells made within squinting distance of the array has been working like a charm since it was turned on in late 2008.

Global’s CTO Jeff Britt told me a few months ago (before he officially took on the dual-kahuna role of  president/CEO at the company) that the installation was “doing really well” and was running “above modeled values in terms of power output. We routinely see 600 kilowatts of output over the course of the day.”   

To get a clearer assessment of the number of solar production facilities powered, at least in significant part, by the sun, readers are encouraged to comment or otherwise let me know of other operating or planned significant installations on the top of, alongside, or draping the outer walls of PV manufacturing plants.

Do the Centrosolar and Reis projects offer signs of a trend where one will be able to say, “solar is as solar does,” and megawatts more of PV power will help energize the production of gigawatts more cells and panels?

When that happens, we will truly have cause to give thanks.