Blacktown City Council Solar Panel Installation Complete

The installation of solar panels for a 707kW PV project for Sydney’s Blacktown City Council involving multiple sites was completed last week according to Risen Energy Australia.

In February this year, Blacktown City Council voted in favour of a target of 100% renewable electricity for its operations by 2025. Then in August, Council announced it had entered into Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Solar Professionals for on-site solar power that would more than double its existing PV capacity.

The project is claimed to be Australia’s largest rooftop solar PPA installation where the system is paid for, installed and operated by a single solar provider.

1,876 Risen Energy solar panels have been installed across 16 buildings, including leisure and aquatic centres (Stanhope Recreation Centre pictured above), libraries, childcare and community centres. The image below shows Solar Professionals’ moonlit crane lift of solar panels on September 28 for a 99.63kW installation on the Max Webber Library in Blacktown. The lift started at 10pm and finished at 3am the following morning.

Image: Solar Professionals via Facebook

“Risen is heartened that our panels will play a part in supporting the council in achieving their target of 100% renewable energy for Council operations by 2025, as this is also in line with our vision of a 100% green future,” said Risen Energy (Australia)’s General Manager, Eric Lee.

No doubt Blacktown City Council is also pretty happy with the arrangement as it has paid nothing up-front under the 10-year PPA with Solar Professionals and is expected to save $170,000 annually on its electricity costs.

Risen Bags Big Bifacial Panel Order

In other recent news from Risen Energy, the company has disclosed the signing of a contract for 1.5 GW of its bifacial monocrystalline PERC solar panels.

“The contract, which distributes the new technology onto the European, African and South American continents, is already well underway with some 900 MW organised and concludes in the first half of 2021,” stated Risen.

The deal represented one of the company’s largest orders to date.

Bifacial solar panels absorb light and generate electricity from each side of the module, and are best suited to large-scale ground-mount PV projects. According to Risen, the cost of its bifacial modules is only marginally higher than the “old guard”.

Risen Energy was founded in 1986 and its Australian subsidiary kicked off operations here in 2008. The company claims to be the sixth largest solar panel supplier in the world. According to GlobalData’s top ten list of solar panel manufacturers for global shipments last year, Risen was ranked no. 7 in 2019.

Original Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/blacktown-solar-rollout-mb1723/