Stockton, California-based tracking manufacturer Mechatron Solar has recently reached the one-year operation anniversary of a 723-kW system with 24 gearless dual-axis trackers in Escalon, California. The system was comprised of Talesun 335-W modules, SolarEdge inverters with optimizers and Mechatron’s D170 trackers.
Energy production was tracked and collected by the SolarEdge portal monitoring power and energy yielding and data was used to run analysis of the “broad shoulder” production curves of the dual-axis tracker. The analysis revealed several important elements:
- The actual kilowatt-hour production of 2,417 kWh/kWp between July 2017 and July 2018 from the D170 gearless dual-axis trackers surpassed PVSyst estimates by about 3%. The analysis showed several months with great discrepancy between real numbers and PVSyst projections that were attributed to weather conditions.
- Mechatron found that gearless dual-axis trackers, compared with fixed racks and horizontal single-axis trackers, produced more power that exceeded the increase in cost. There is no specific mention of what Mechatron compared its data to, but the company said its gearless dual-axis trackers produced about 16% more kilowatt-hours than horizontal single-axis trackers, and about 37% more than ground-mount fixed-tilt racks. In addition, the increase in revenues were further enhanced by the time-of-use (TOU) rate structure which compensates with higher rate factors the additional evening energy production. Gearless dual-axis trackers produced about 21% more revenue than horizontal single-axis trackers, and 45% more than ground-mount fixed racks at the same site.
- During the first year of operating the 24-trackers solar system, the measured and documented operational uptime reached 99.78% with only 240 hours of downtime for all 24 trackers for the whole year. The corrective actions and adjustments during the first year of operating the trackers is projecting an uptime increase to 99.92% for the next 12-month period.
News item from Mechatron
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