Renewables developer Arevon energy plans to use Nextracker single-axis trackers in its 1.5-GW portfolio of solar projects in Indiana and Nevada. Nextracker will supply NX Horizon solar trackers with accompanying proprietary software and control systems.
Credit: Nextracker
Indiana will host five of these solar power plants: Elliott (200 MW), Gibson (280 MW), Ratts 1 and Ratts 2 (both 150 MW) and Posey (300 MW). The 250-MW Citadel project will be located outside of Reno, Nevada.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm and Rep. Susie Lee recently toured the seventh site in the portfolio, the 232 MW Townsite plant in Boulder City, Nevada.
“We’re excited to partner with Nextracker and use their state-of-the-art technology in this latest portfolio of solar projects,” said Justin Johnson, Arevon’s executive VP and COO. “Nextracker was our first choice to help standardize construction practices across the portfolio and create efficiencies and greater cost savings.”
Data from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) projects close to 5 GW of solar will be installed in Indiana over the next five years, ranking the state’s pipeline as the sixth-largest in the country. SEIA estimates that Nevada, ranked seventh, will install more than 4 GW over the same period.
These seven projects totaling more than 1.5 GW will be key to these two states meeting their renewable energy goals. They are all expected to be operational by the end of 2023.
“Sophisticated asset managers and project developers like Arevon know the importance of standardizing their utility-scale solar projects with advanced data monitoring and optimization software,” said Ryan Booth, Nextracker’s VP of utility sales. “Our partnership with Arevon highlights how the future of solar development will leverage system standardization to improve project value in an increasingly competitive sector.”
News item from Nextracker
It’s just getting interesting as the solar PV farm is being (standardized) to a point. Solar PV panel prices still allow one to build a more robust D.C. buss to help insure meeting contracted PPA output of the site each day, be it hazy or a little cloudy. The so called “clipping” is running from 1.3 to 1 up around 1.5 to one. Folks are starting to design during the EPC of a solar PV farm including, “clipping”, single axis tracking which can allow 2 to 4 hours more sun harvest each day over fixed arrays. Now some are making “serial” D.C. sites where the D.C. strings are sent to a utility scale energy storage system and then to the inverter cabinets for on demand generation. This also allows one to switch as many inverters are needed to supply the grid loads. This will allow a site some throttling that a lot of rotating mass generation sites cannot do.
Take for example the 250MW solar PV farm. Use clipping in the design at a 1.5 to 1 ratio and the D.C. buss would actually provide 375/MWp to the battery storage system, which could be up to 1,200MWh, maybe more energy storage. The smart system algorithms could then be used to put out say 50MWh during the day ( duck curve ) saving most of the energy for later use. With the desert area sun hours a day, enhanced by the single axis East/West tracking one could see an average of 7 hours a day energy generation in Winter and up to 12 hours of energy generation in Summer hours. Right about 4 or 5 PM one could begin to use the energy storage and step up generation output to 100MWh for 12 hours or 200MWh for 6 hours. From now on, there should be no solar PV or wind farm constructed from now on without at least 6 hours of energy storage available.