The diligence of builders and installers, the ingenuity of engineers, the guidance of developers, and the commitment of numerous nearby companies, governmental organizations, and nonprofits have been recognized as a well-done collaborative accomplishment out west. Leaving coal behind and jumping into the solar future, the Escalante Solar project has just … [continued]
Machine Learning Software Optimizes Energy Yield on Uneven Terrain and in Diffuse Light Conditions.
Bifacial solar cells and panels are moving more seriously into play now thanks to cost drops and efficiency improvements. A bifacial solar panel is essentially a solar panel that can collect energy from the front side and the rear side (a normal monofacial panel only collects energy from one side). Array Technologies boosts that technology even further with solar tracking technology, capturing much more sunlight than a normal solar array.
Australia is adding one mega-solar project equivalent per month, with the current installed base of 10 gigawatts projected to double by the end of 2020. The latest mega-solar project is the 333 megawatt Darlington Point Solar Farm headed for Griffith, New South Wales, according to Array Technologies, which is providing the single-axis trackers for the project.
The multi-billion dollar global demand for solar trackers is red hot, and expected to continue to glow red for at least the next five years, according to the latest market forecast. The global single-axis solar photovoltaic tracker market is expected to show a cumulative average growth rate of close to 28% during the period 2019-2023.
Ron Corio, the founder and chief innovation officer at Array Technologies, has been named a Lifetime Achiever within the 2018 S&P Global Platts Global Energy Awards. In a black tie affair, Corio, who has built and delivered 25 gigawatt-years of solar tracker generation to sites around the world, was honored Dec. 6 in New York as a godfather of the solar tracker industry.
Array Technologies, a company we recently featured due to its work testing bifacial solar panels and solar trackers, has added a set of software algorithms dubbed SmarTrack to its latest generation of solar tracker, the DuraTrack HZ v3, enhancing the system ability to react to weather and site conditions.
The desire for optimal energy production in large solar power plants has engineers looking to an invention created in the latter 1960s, a technology that has been dormant while the broader PV market has exploded. Bifacial solar cells and panels are moving more seriously into play now thanks to cost drops and efficiency improvements.
I enjoyed a group of refreshing high-energy people in presentations, lunches, dinners, and solar power plant tours for a few days last week. It lifted my energy in a number of ways. I liked learning about the nuts and bolts of advanced solar power systems — that was part of it. The positive, engaging conversations with smart and oh so lively solar engineers set my standards for dinner companions up a notch. Maybe I like hearing people mention algorithms quite often. I plan to follow this piece with a few more technological posts, but this first one is about solar engineers, the people behind the technology.
A new report published this week from GTM Research shows that the amount of solar PV trackers shipped in 2017 increased 32% year-over-year, as California-based NEXTracker retains its top spot and accounts for a third of all trackers sold last year.
