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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

SolarWorld Gets Biggest Project

In SolarWorld’s largest single project ever, the firm has partnered with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power to use the company’s solar panels at a DWP facility in the high desert. SolarWorld won the contract, which was announced on March 3, in an intensive bidding process, according to Ben Santarris, public affairs manager of SolarWorld Industries America. “As we aggressively ramp up our domestic manufacturing production toward our capacity of 500 megawatt of annual production, we are pleased to build out the various segments of our business,” Santarris said. The company is undertaking various public projects recently completing one for the City of Bakersfield. SolarWorld has operated a facility in Camarillo since the late 1970s and the location is the hub of their sales and marketing arm in America. This site employs around 250 where they also assemble modules for the solar panels. In its Hillsboro, Ore., facility, the firm operates the largest crystalline silicon photovoltaic manufacturing plant with 1,000 employees. At this location they produce silicon crystal, wafers, photovoltaic cells and modules in two buildings totaling 690,000 square feet of manufacturing space on about 100 acres. “More utilities companies have embraced the value of mid-sized utility-scale solar projects,” Santarris said. SolarWorld manufactures a high-performance product that draws on decades of engineering project-scale solar and we certainly expect to continue to succeed in this field that we helped to pioneer,” he said. Eight proposals SolarWorld was selected for the LADWP Adelanto Solar Project through a request for proposals (RFP) first issued on June 18, 2009 to help LADWP achieve its goal of gaining 35 percent of all its energy from renewable energy sources by 2020, LADWP evaluated eight proposals for the Adelanto site from pre-qualified contractors, said Aram Benyamin, the utility’s senior assistant general manager – power system. “The proposal from SolarWorld was favored on the basis of best levelized cost of energy and technical qualifications and all companies had the opportunity to competitively bid on specific solar sites to be built.” Preliminary and design work started in February at the Adelanto Converter Station with installation of the solar arrays to begin in mid July. This site was strongly preferred and feasible on account of the plentiful solar resources there, the available 43 acres of land south of the converter station, access to LADWP existing station facilities and the electrical transmission system. This makes the solar energy more easily delivered to the City of Los Angeles electrical distribution grid, he said. Benyamin said this project is the only one SolarWorld is currently working on for the LADWP.

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