Page 62 - Solar Power in Building Design The Engineer's Complete Design Resource

32 SOLAR POWER TECHNOLOGIES

Figure 2.11 Amonix MegaConcentrator solar farm. Photo courtesy of Amonix.

units and three 25-kW units as shown in Figure 2.9 The MegaModules from the three
20-kW units were moved to a new 35-kW drive system that incorporates seven
MegaModules. The units in the west field have produced over 1185 MWh of grid
power since the start of operation.
A second field of Amonix units has been installed on the east side of the APS STAR
facility. There are a total of five 25-kW units, which form a 125-kW solar power system.
Ever since operation of the units since 2002 the solar power system has generated
over 832 MWh of grid power.

SYSTEM PERFORMANCE
Part of the Mega Concentrator development plan has been to deploy one or more units
at different possible solar sites in order to test the hardware under the various envi-
ronmental conditions to determine the operating performance. Units have been
deployed in Southern California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and Georgia, and there have
been different lessons learned from each of the sites. Some of the units have been in
field operation for 6 years, and the accumulated 3.5 GWh of electric grid energy.

A WORD ABOUT AMONIX
Amonix was formed in the 1990s to commercialize a high-concentration silicon solar cell
developed at Stanford University. Several configurations of structure, drives, and controls
were manufactured and field-tested in early 2000. To verify the manufacturability of the