Air Force Base Harvests Solar Energy

In North America, near to Las Vegas on the Nellis Air Force Base, they expect to bring the final portion of the largest solar panel installation of the continent online by the end of this month. This will save the Nellis Air Force Base 1 million dollars a year.

This new and last part of the installation is a 15-megawatt installation consists out 70000 solar-panel array that will cover 140 acres of the base. These solar panels are installed and set up so they are able to follow the sun’s movements throughout the day.

When this last part is active, then the whole the installation is expected to provide up to 30 percent of the base's power and so will save more than 83 thousand dollars a month in energy costs. Which is a huge cost that will decrease.

They started this project in June 2007 and the Nellis Air Force base works together with SunPower Corp. that is the manufacturer of the solar panels, financers and the government.

But these panels are very expensive, the expected costs are more than 100 million dollars, and so the panels remain in the hands of the constructor SunPower and the financer MMA Renewables. And the base will be able to purchase the electricity generated from the panels at a fixed rate.

Source: Greenbiz.com
Nellis.af.mil
Dimitri Delbeke