Case Study, O&M

Capacity Restored to Solar Farm After Severe Damage

49 MW

Total panels sourced

$250 million

Capital investment protected

When a once-in-a-lifetime violent hail storm decommissioned more than one-third of the solar panels at a solar farm in the southwestern United States, the farm’s owner and operator turned to Kinect Solar to source a large quantity of replacement panels.

Customer snapshot

A global Fortune 500 developer, operator and financier of utility-scale renewable energy projects with a >10GW solar portfolio.

THE CHALLENGE

Source a large volume of legacy solar panels

The 1,500 acre solar farm includes more than 650,000 solar panels in a 72-split cell, 2x1m format. That format is no longer in regular production.

Though the owner-operator maintained the recommended number of spare parts for repairs and maintenance, the extensive hail damage rendered more modules unusable than could have been forecasted. They needed more than 120,000 additional solar modules to return the farm to full capacity.

The Solution

Kinect Solar procured all modules needed without requiring equipment upgrades

Kinect Solar has an extensive industry network, including relationships with thousands of manufacturers, developers, and independent power producers. Thanks to this positioning and specialization in the secondary solar market, Kinect Solar experts were able to quickly locate replacement solar panels that were compatible with the solar farm’s existing inverter blocks.

Critically, this allowed the system to be repowered without requiring new inverters. Upgraded inverters would have added significant costs  to the repair.

Specialty quality control satisfied the financier and insurance requirements

Additionally, Kinect Solar facilitated electroluminescence (EL) imaging on a sample of the panels as well as multiple visual inspections and flash testing. These quality control measures at both the origin warehouse and during shipment to the project site, met the due diligence requirements in place for the owner-operator to protect the original $250 million capital investment.