US solar tracker manufacturer GameChange Solar and Chinese firm Jiangsu Zhenjiang New Energy Equipment (JZNEE) will build a new tracker manufacturing facility in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, with an annual component production capacity of up to 3GW.
The facility will produce components for GameChange Solar’s Genius Tracker products, and will include parts such as actuators, node controllers and drive systems. The company noted that it could expand the annual production capacity of the facility to 5GW, and that it expects to begin commercial operations in June this year.
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“Our partnership with JZNEE and expansion into the Middle East underscores our commitment to growing our global renewable energy presence,” said Vikas Bansal, president of international at GameChange Solar. “We are excited to provide our Middle East customers and engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) partners with locally manufactured, built, and serviced solar tracker solutions.”
While the companies did not specify the projects to which the components would be delivered, the Genius Tracker range has been deployed at a number of utility-scale projects, including the 560MW Kom Ombo project in Egypt and the 232MW Oriana Solar project in the US.
The Genius Tracker range aims to improve efficiency for both construction and operation, with GameChange Solar noting that the range’s “WeatherSmart” function can deliver 1.5% more power over a year than other trackers. In addition, earlier this year, industry analyst Eclipse-M completed a study into the deployment of the Genius Tracker products, and found that the devices required 28% less labour to construct than “the average of three market-relevant 1P trackers.”
This is GameChange Solar’s latest expansion of its manufacturing capacity, following the opening of a 2.5GW manufacturing facility in Brazil in January, and its plans to expand its annual US production capacity to 35GW.