Optisolar Building Largest Solar Farm in North America

In Sarnia, Petrolia, and Tilbury, Ontario, OptiSolar Farms has installed and will continue to install hundreds of thousands of ground-mounted solar panels that capture energy from the sun and convert it to electricity. The projects have generated several million dollars in local construction work and procurement contracts, and will supply thousands of Canadian homes with electricity. Total projected generation from these three completed projects is 90 megawatts annually.

Next month the company plans to submit its application for a Conditional Use Permit to San Luis Obispo County. This is the first step to realization of a grand project, a 550-megawatt photovoltaic (PV) solar farm on over 6000 acres, the largest in North America. Construction is targeted to begin in 2010, after all the paperwork is done, and installation of panels will occur over the next three years.

Optisolar is an unusual energy company in that it manufactures its own solar panels as well as building the generating installations that use them; this is a unique level of vertical integration. They boast that their panels use such a thin film of crystalline silicon that they can produce them at a reasonable cost and without depleting the resource, yet are engineered to last. OptiSolar also claims that its photovoltaic solar cells are significantly more cost effective than solar thermal systems as they require less expensive silicon during manufacture, consume little water, and require far less maintenance than turbine based systems. In addition they don’t need large structures and don’t make noise. (Read more at www.optisolar.com.)

www.optisolarfarms.ca