Satcon Technology Corp. is a leading provider of utility-grade power conversion solutions for the renewable energy market. The company today announced that Satcon’s Solstice® has been selected for the 63 megawatt (MW) CIRO One Solar PV Plant in the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
Satcon Solstice uses string level power conversion and energy harvest optimization integrated with a highly optimized centralized inverter to form a complete system that increases overall energy yield of solar installations by 5-12 percent. At the same time, the system has the ability to reduce the other balance of system material costs by 20-25 percent compared to a centralized inverter system.
CIRO One will use 126 Satcon Solstice 500 kilowatt solutions for large-scale commercial and utility-scale solar power plants located on 180 acres within the Lapas District of Salinas. The company said the project is expected to generate 116 million kilowatt hours of energy, the equivalent of saving 201,000 barrels of oil annually.
“The CIRO One Solar PV plant installation is one of the largest and most advanced in the world,” Ruben Perez, president of the CIRO Group of San Juan stated in the press release. “The project presented us with significant challenges that required us to leverage the most advanced technologies available. The size of the installation combined with the uneven terrain at various elevations presented us with system design constraints, necessitating the flexibility that Satcon Solstice delivers. Satcon has provided us with the technologies and system-wide expertise that has helped us to make renewable energy resources a significant component of the Puerto Rican electricity grid, helping us to achieve a higher degree of energy independence and alleviating the Commonwealth’s dependence on crude oil.”
Steve Rhoades, Satcon’s president and CEO, underscored the achievement of the power plant in reference to its scale and technology, and noted its ability to meet industry challenges.
“The CIRO One Solar PV plant is a significant accomplishment in both its size and sophistication,” Rhoades said. “The value of Satcon Solstice is in its ability to take very large installations, like CIRO’s, and to divide them up into less than 3 kilowatt (kW) increments, which enables tailored design flexibility to address the variable geographical constraints and the challenges associated with such terrain, generating significant performance improvements through fine-grained energy harvest. The result is a highly optimized utility-scale power plant that has higher reliability and higher power production levels, all of which can be viewed and controlled by the utility just as they manage all other power plant assets on their grid network.”
CIRO One’s construction of the power plant is slated to begin this month.
For more information please visit www.Satcon.com
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