Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 10:43:27 AM - by Tom Staples

Boston-based Satcon, which provides power conversion and system design solutions for utility-scale renewable energy projects, announced recently that it had installed four 250 kilowatt Satcon inverters at the Orange County, Florida, Convention Center, which is the largest solar rooftop installation in the Southeast.

The convention center, located in Orlando, has 200,000 square feet of monocrystalline photovoltaic (PV) panels that will deliver 1.1 megawatts of clean solar power, or enough to power more than 100 homes for a year.

Designed and built by Johnson Controls Inc., a leading provider of products and services that optimize energy use and improve comfort and security, the solar array will also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 1 million pounds per year, which is the equivalent of removing 100 cars from U.S. roads.

The inverters, Satcon’s patented PowerGate® Plus, convert the direct current (DC) energy from the solar array to alternating current (AC) for use in the convention center. Inverters are an essential aspect of alternative energy production, enabling conversion of DC to AC, which is how the utility companies deliver power in the United States. Thus, American businesses and homes are electrically configured to accept only AC power, with DC conversion modules built into such items as PCs and telephone answering machines.

The solar array, with its Satcon inverters, is expected to significantly reduce the amount of electricity the convention center currently gets from local utility Progress Energy. Progress, which gets more than one-third of its energy from nuclear power (a resource it is lobbying for inclusion under Waxman-Markey’s renewable energy standard, or RES), has only about 25 kilowatt-hours of solar energy in its mix.

A Climate-Change Education Center inside the Orange County Convention Center will show visitors and students how much solar energy is being produced at any given time, as well as information on carbon emissions reductions and system efficiency – a rating certain to be improved by Satcon’s world-class inverters, which have demonstrated their reliability across thousands of hours of commercial use. This education center also details the effects of global warming due to fossil-fuel burning.

The solar array, a cooperative venture between Johnson Controls, Satcom and the Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC), was put in service on May 14 with various Florida political figures in attendance, as well as representatives from the OUC, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Florida Department of Energy, and the Orange County Environmental Protection Agency.

The Orange County Convention Center is the second largest convention facility in the nation, bringing about 1.4 million visitors to Orlando to attend more than 250 scheduled events, so the addition of a solar array and Climate Change kiosk can only benefit solar energy by introducing its tremendous rewards in terms of clean, renewable (and, soon, competitively affordable) energy.