The Solar Acceleration Center (SolarTAC) uses 74 acres and Colorado's abundant sunshine to research, test, validate and demonstrate solar technologies. The site includes areas for testing photovoltaic and concentrated solar power (CSP) technologies.
The SolarTAC project in Aurora was started in 2009 and in now made up of six public and private sectors: Xcel Engery, Abengoa Solar, SunEdison, The Alliance for Sustainable Energy, Amonix and EPRI.
Many different projects are tested at SolarTAC. The facility is covered with solar panels.
"[The panels are a] concentrated photovoltaic [system], so this is where you're using different technologies to collect and compress the sun and put it on panels that are much, much smaller," Dustin Smith, executive director of SolarTAC said.
A solar photovoltaic system, or PV system, uses solar panels to convert sunlight into electricity.
Batteries nearly as large as semi-trucks are among those projects.
"We have installed this battery to see how we might be able to use it to help smooth out the variability of solar PV on our grid when we get into higher penetrations than what we're seeing today," Frank Novachek, Excel Energy director of corporate planning said.
To better explain how the battery would help smooth out solar photovoltaic arrays, which are linked series of solar panels, Novacheck gives this example:
"An analogy might be a comb, as an example, if you held the comb up on the smooth edge top [of the comb], that's kind of what the profile of the power output from a solar array looks like [on a sunny day]. But then on a cloudy day, if you flip [the comb] over, it looks more like the teeth of a comb. [The solar array] has these hills and valleys that we really need to smooth out to make sure we don't flicker on our system and that sort of thing."
The National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) has a solar and meteorological measurement station at SolorTAC. The station is located at SolarTAC to measure the amount of energy that goes into each project to help make them more efficient and less expensive to produce.
"[The station] serves the entire facility at SolarTAC and that's one of NREL's roles is to provide accurate solar measurements, because all of this technology is for solar power plants and fuel for that is, of course, light," Steve Wilcox of NREL said.
"We are measuring several components of the solar energy as it comes through the atmosphere. Some of it directly from the sun, some of it from the sky-dome itself, because all of that light is available for conversion to electricity," Wilcox said.
The light that is converted into energy is affected by things in the atmosphere. Wilcox says the fires in Arizona will reduce the amount energy produced.
"The past few days I think people [have seen] an almost blood-red sun as it comes up, and that's from the solar energy being absorbed and scattered as it goes through all the smoke. And we do see [changes] compared with a very clear day. The past two or three days, perhaps a 15 percent or 20 percent reduction [in energy]," Wilcox said.
SolarTAC wants to bring new technologies from the lab to the field.
"We're really trying to bring these technologies at a utility scale, a massive scaled to the market very quickly. And it's one thing to test it in your backyard but it's another to bring it in do it in a large scale, and we able to scale that up from half a megawatt to 300 megawatts," Smith said.
Smith says they have started to see new jobs being created in the field.
"Companies build research here and then they start bringing people to Colorado and you know it just increases our whole," Smith said.
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