Last week Cogentrix Energy officially began commercial operation of its 30MW Alamosa CPV project in Colorado. Today, Solectria advised that it had provided over 500 large CPV pedestals, smart inverters and dual axis trackers for the project, which has been dubbed the largest high CPV generating facility in the world.
The project, which extends across 225 acres, uses Solectria’ s utility-scale inverters and is interconnected at the 115kV transmission level. Alamosa sports a novel PV plant controller, allowing the operator to choose between different smart grid operating modes. The plant can produce large amounts of reactive power, closed loop power factor control, and AC voltage regulation while also permitting the controller to throttle the site’s solar energy output to help regulate the grid frequency when needed.
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“The Alamosa project demonstrates the immense capabilities of smart grid inverters which will be put to use throughout the United States in the coming years,” said Phil Vyhanek, president of Solectria Renewables. “I am immensely proud of the achievements of our power systems engineering group, which was created to support large site customers like Cogentrix, during plant testing and certification.”
