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The Solar Living Center’s Renewable Energy System
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The Solar Living Center has afforded Real Goods a golden opportunity to fully “walk the talk.” As the company that sold the very first PV module retail in America in 1979, the company remains at the cutting edge of renewable energy demonstration projects.
The 12.5-acre site has an optimum solar window, allowing a full day of sun over 300 days a year. The nearby Feliz Creek canyon forms a natural venturi directing strong winds across the site, which also provides a unique wind-energy opportunity. Solar and wind can power the entire site, including all facilities. The system is utility-intertied for storage, backup, and sell back, and a modest battery bank can provide three to eight hours of emergency power in the event of a grid failure while there is no sun or wind.
The power-producing system consists of 10kWp of photovoltaics (provided by Siemens Solar) and a 3kW Whisper wind generator on an 80-foot tower. There are 2kW of PV on a fixed array mounted on the south roof of the storage/office building. The six remaining arrays are located on active trackers. One tracker is dedicated to PV direct water pumping, and the last five power the site and sell the surplus back to Pacific Gas & Electric.
A donated Ananda Power Center manages all the systems, providing overcurrent protection for all DC inputs and loads as well as charge controlling for the PV and wind systems with shunts for monitoring. Trace Engineering donated four SW5548 inverters, each rated at 5500W. The inverters provide the interface to the utility for sell back and will support the store as a standby system in the event of a power failure. The utility service is 400A, single phase 120/240 volt.
Real Goods has had a great deal of support for this project from corporate sponsors who share the vision of a better way to develop commercial properties, but the company didn’t choose any of the products solely because they were donated. The criteria for selection was that the product must be commercially available, priced within reason and represent the state-of-the-art in technology that the average visitor could relate to. Real Goods purchased many renewable energy (RE) products that were more appropriate than some free offerings. The same was true for the building materials.
The following is a list of the RE equipment:
• 10kW Siemens PC-4 and M-55 PV modules *
• 4 Trace Engineering SW5548 inverters *
• 3 Small Power Systems active trackers *
• 1 Ananda Power Tech. APT5-444-48 Power Center, w/2 TDR
controllers
• 5 Array Tech active trackers
• 1 World Power Tech. Whisper 3000LV wind generator
• 16 Interstate U2200 deep cycle batteries, 6V - 220Ah
*denotes an RE equipment full sponsor. The rest provided some form of a discount.
Jeff Oldham was Project Manager for the Solar Living Center, 13201 South Highway 101, Hopland, California 95449, (707) 744-2100, FAX (707) 744-1342.
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