Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

Satcon Technology has delivered 23MW of its PowerGate Plus 500kW solar PV inverters to GCL Solar for its 20MW Jiming Hill Xunzhou solar plant and its 3MW Yancheng Guoneng rooftop installation.

Touted as the largest urban solar power plant in the U.S. a 10MW facility on the south-side of Chicago, the new plant will use Satcon’s 1MW Prism inverters. The site, owned and operated by Exelon Generation, was designed and is being constructed by SunPower Corp, using approximately 32,300 of its solar modules as well as SunPower’s trackers.

Satcon has been selected for the California Public Utilities Commission approved CalRENEW-1 installation located in Mendota, CA. This is the first utility-scale PV solar farm to be approved by the commission under the state's Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) program.

Satcon Technology has released its Solstice, a utility grade solar PV solution for large scale solar power plants, for general availability in North America. The Solstice is projected to deliver fine grained power harvesting and control with progressive utility ready grid interconnection. It is anticipated to boost total power production by 5-12% and reduce overall system material costs.

Satcon’s PowerGate Plus 500kW solar PV inverters were selected and are fully operational at Canada’s First Light solar farm, which was developed through a joint venture between SunEdison and SkyPower. Located on 90 acres in Stone Mills, Ontario, the First Light project totals 9.1MW, uses 18 of the PowerGate Plus inverters and is anticipated to generate more than 10 million Kwhs in its first year.

Satcon has signed a collaborative deal with Canadian Solar that will see the companies market their products to customers as a “best-in-class system solution”. Canadian Solar’s solar PV systems will be marketed with Satcon’s solar inverters, providing a single solution for rooftop solar energy generation. The agreement also complies with the Ontario government’s domestic content requirements in its recently announced feed-in-tariff program.

Satcon will expand its global photovoltaic inverter and other manufacturing capacity to more than 600MW in 2009 between its production facilities in Burlington, Ontario, and Shenzhen, China, as well as partner with DB Schenker Logistics to provide global logistics and transportation services for Satcon's global supply chain needs.

Boasting the title of the largest solar energy rooftop in the southeastern U.S., the Orange County Convention Center has been fitted with four of Satcon’s 250kW PowerGate Plus inverters. The 200,000 square-foot rooftop PV system, designed and built by Johnson Controls, Inc., will generate 1.1MWp per annum, or approximately 1.1 million kWh.

La Ola, Hawaii’s largest solar photovoltaic farm, is situated on a 10-acre site in south Lana’i on the Palawai Basin, and will provide 1.2MW of energy to the island. Satcon’s PowerGate Plus Spectrum micro-grid solution has been selected to power the plant, which is the first of its kind to be controlled remotely by a utility, Maui Electric Company, Ltd. (MECO).

Satcon Technology has signed a strategic agreement with Siliken Renewable Energy USA to supply 40 MW of its next-generation PowerGate Plus PV power conditioning solutions to the North American subsidiary of the Spanish system integrator over the next 12 months.

Satcon Prism a fully integrated one megawatt medium voltage (MV) solution optimized for utility scale solar PV installations. Leveraging Satcon's industry standard setting PowerGate(R) Plus 500kW solar PV inverters, Prism is a utility grade one megawatt platform, complete with factory integrated step-up transformers, MV disconnect switches, and power conversion electronics.

Satcon Spectrum is the industry’s first complete solar PV micro and island grid solution.  Spectrum integrates Satcon’s leading solar inverter solutions with battery storage, advanced monitoring and management features, and remote controllability, enabling utilities to address the challenges of intermittency, as well as leverage large scale solar power production as a stable, dispatchable source of energy.

Solstice, Satcon's distributed energy management system, is engineered from the ground up to provide granular control over every component in the array—from a single string, to the inverter, to power delivered to the grid.

Satcon PowerGate Plus solar PV inverters have a significant impact on the profitability dynamic of commercial- and utility-scale solar PV systems. With their unparalleled system intelligence, next-generation Edge MPPT technology, and industrial-grade engineering, PowerGate Plus inverters provide rugged and reliable solutions that maximize system uptime and power production, even in the harshest environments.