Satcon Technology, a provider of utility-grade power conversion systems for the renewable energy market, has secured a contract to supply its Solstice power-harvesting and array management system for the 63MW CIRO One solar PV plant in the US Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
The construction of CIRO One solar PV plant on 180 acres within the Lapas District of Salinas will begin in October of 2010, and the plant will utilize 126 Satcon Solstice 500kW power harvesting systems to generate 116 million kilowatt hours of energy.
Satcon Solstice integrates string level power conversion and energy harvest system with centralized inverter to increase the overall energy yield of solar installations by 5-12% while reducing the other balance of system material costs by 20-25% compared to a centralized inverter system.
Satcon president and CEO Steve Rhoades said that the value of Satcon Solstice is in its ability to take large installations, like CIRO’s, and to divide them up into less than 3kW increments, enabling design flexibility to address the variable geographical constraints 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,” Rhoades said.