Comanche Solar Project
Colorado
Colorado's biggest solar farm was built right beside a coal-fired power plant so it could borrow the coal plant's wires.
Colorado's largest solar farm went up next door to a coal plant, on purpose. The Comanche Solar Project sits on about nine hundred acres in two parcels, right beside the coal-fired Comanche Generating Station. The coal plant already had a high-capacity substation and transmission lines running out of it. Plugging the panels in there meant the power had somewhere to go from the first day. It came online in late 2016 as the biggest solar facility in the state, rated at a hundred and twenty megawatts. The count of panels is oddly precise: five hundred and two thousand and fifty-six of them, made by Trina Solar. They sit on single-axis trackers that follow the sun across the day. The rows are grouped into seventy-five blocks, and each block feeds the grid through its own inverter. Xcel Energy agreed to buy the electricity for twenty-five years, after deciding through open bidding that the price competed with natural gas.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
The project occupies a total of about 900 acres split into two parcels that are adjacent to the coal-fired Comanche Generating Station; thus providing access to existing high-capacity substation and transmission infrastructure.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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