The electrical grid in California is strained at a point seldom seen in history. Prolonged heat and extreme weather events have led to power outages and rolling blackouts, threatening businesses and livelihoods throughout the South and American West.
Taylor Farms in San Juan Bautista cannot afford to be without electricity, even for a few hours. The 450,000-square-foot facility is a 50-acre farm processing operation where vegetables are trimmed, mixed into salads and packaged for shipment and sale. The need for constant refrigeration to help ensure the safety of the nation’s food supply is paramount.
When the California Independent System Operator (ISO) – which oversees the electrical grid serving 80% of the state – called for customers to reduce their energy use, it threatened Taylor Farms’ ability to ensure food safety and operate its business.
PowerShingle utilizes a highly effective water-shedding design that keeps everything beneath clean and dry, eliminating the need for costly sub roofing typically required with conventional solar systems. It also features a bifacial design that gathers sunlight from both sides, providing a steady supply of clean, affordable solar energy.
The PowerShingle system didn’t require Taylor Farms to give up any valuable farmland to install the elevated solar structures. The PowerShingle arrays consist of three 585-foot long canopies elevated 14 feet, offering more than 75,000 square feet of weather-protected canopy and clean power generation. This structure can generate up to 1.32 MW of clean energy per hour, while allowing produce to be stored and cars and other equipment to operate freely underneath.
PowerShingle’s pre-engineered solar structures, which work with any Nucor purlin design and can be customized with spans of up to 200 feet, are made from 80% recycled domestic steel and can be certified Econiq™, Nucor’s net-zero carbon steel.
PowerShingle maintains greater efficiency than standard solar arrays. Over the lifespan of a typical array – typically 30 years – solar panels lose about 1% of efficiency per year. PowerShingle, however, loses only about 0.66% efficiency per year, meaning an array can be in service for 10 years longer than standard arrays.
With federal tax incentives for converting to solar energy, the cost savings achieved with PowerShingle could be substantial.
Taylor Farms is already considering expansion of the solar program to its other farms, spread across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
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