Pictures of Ford's massive 13.5MW solar plant at Pretoria Factory

[Hanno Labuschagne]

Pictures of Ford's massive 13.5MW solar plant at Pretoria Factory

Ford South Africa has announced it now supplies more than a third of its Silverton Assembly Plant's energy needs with solar power.

The company partnered with SolarAfrica on the first phase of its Project Blue Oval renewable energy programme, resulting in the construction of a 13.5MW solar power plant, sufficient to carry 35% of the Pretoria plant's energy demands.

The power is drawn from 30,226 photovoltaic (PV) solar panels installed on the roofs of 3,610 parking bays.

 

[NeoZA]

and one wage disagreement and it will be gone. lol

 

[Hemi300c]

Impressive

 

[TheChamp]

and one wage disagreement and it will be gone. lol

Like which wage disagreement did they have previously that resulted in something similar?

 

[zolly]

My brother has been going on about how we need more projects like this, or more bluntly "Eskom is stuffed in the short term and everyone else including corporates needs to get into generating their own power".

 

[marine1]

And eskom and the ANC will charge them a penalty for using solar. It's a complete bloody joke

 

[marine1]

and one wage disagreement and it will be gone. lol

Yup

 

[WollieVerstege]

Ultimately this is the huge plus for PV and Wind, you don't need any extra land space to put it up. You can convert existing roof-, carpark-, etc. space.

 

[WaxLyrical]

Where do they keep the fire extinguishers?

 

[TheChamp]

One of the few instances on MyBb where the word massive is totally justified.

 

[W@P]

All those panels running to a Sunsynk inverter?

 

[TheChamp]

Panels are impressive but pictures of the battery bank would be even more impressive, pity no one was interested in that.

 

[Bigjay84]

No doubt in half the time and half the budget of anything the thieves in charge would have done

 

[Hanno Labuschagne]

Panels are impressive but pictures of the battery bank would be even more impressive, pity no one was interested in that.

No mention of battery storage by Ford, so assume there might not be or could be very small.

 

[Hanno Labuschagne]

All those panels running to a Sunsynk inverter?

Don't think Synsynk makes 100kW inverters. There are also 120 of them.

 

[Cius]

Sounds like a zero storage system. They use their generation as much as possible and Eskom for the balance. No point in storing if you can always use 100% of what you generate. Sucks for Eskom though as it does little to help their peak demand problem and makes the trough in the middle of the day bigger.

 

[1am7h30n3]

That's a massive system! Love it. Really cool the way they used the parking area.

 

[Mista_Mobsta]

Wonder if they have micro-inverters added to the panels to ensure the strings don't go offline if one panel kicks the bucket.

 

[Jet-Fighter7700]

sure there is a team of people employed just to maintain it, nice way to create employment
as that many panels can/will fail, and somebody will have to maintain/fix them

next question is what happens next? cover the entire plant with Panels as well?

 

[1am7h30n3]

I wonder how they deal with panel failures. It's very hard to find stock of the same panel as was bought last time and as I understand it, you need a to have the panels in your series string quite closely matched, can't just throw any old replacement in there.

Actually, it's likely not a big deal on that scale. If one panel in the whole plant fails, then just make that string have 1 less panel, if a bunch of panels fail, just replace one whole string with whatever new panels you can source and use the remaining same type panels as spares in the strings with failures.