North Carolina-based Southern Energy Management (SEM) has installed a 1.13 MW PV array at Marlboro Mushrooms, a mushroom farm near West Grove, Pa. The array comprises nearly 5,000 PV modules.
‘Keeping mushroom crops in a controlled environment requires a tremendous amount of electricity to maintain optimal growing conditions, and we thought it was a natural step to use solar power to shoulder some of that load,’ explains Marlboro Mushrooms' Tom Brosius.
Spread across nearly seven acres, the installation deploys SunPower's T0 tracking system with 228 W modules. ‘Our site for installation slopes to the north, so a traditional fixed PV array would have not been feasible due to shading and the greater footprint required,’ notes Harold Brosius, also of Marlboro Mushrooms.
Construction of the ground-mounted array had a short turnaround time; crews started work on the installation in late August and had the entire system online by the end of November, a full three weeks ahead of schedule, SEM says.
