From pv magazine France
France's VSB Energies Nouvelles has started building a 9 MW solar power plant on a former gravel and sand pit, clay and kaolin extraction site in Druelle Balsac, southern France.
The project was originally supposed to have a capacity of just 5 MW.
“The project participated in a tender held by the CRE in 2016,” Jérémie Baccar, PV development manager for VSB Energies Nouvelles, told pv magazine France. “Then, during the development phase between 2016 and 2021, technological developments allowed us to almost double the installed power of the park, without changing the surface area.”
He said that about 30% of this increase resulted from the evolution of the solar modules, which reached higher power outputs.
“The Soleil de Balsac project was initially planned to have around 26,500 modules with each a power of 300 W,” said Baccar. “In its final configuration, it will have approximately 40,000 modules with each an output of 550 W, which will be provided by Chinese manufacturer GCL.”
In its final configuration, the project also benefited from its optimized layout and the inter-row spacing of the modules – a densification that facilitated a power gain of 55%.
“Important work has been carried out by our development teams to find the optimum between the shading resulting from the bringing together of the modules due to narrower rows and the gain in production obtained thanks to the increase in the number of panels on the park,” said Baccar.
VSB currently has 2 GW of solar under development. Its projects include floating arrays, agrivoltaic installations, PV carports, and large rooftop solar projects.
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How efficient are the panels they are using? Sunpower are 22.5% and produce more power since they have all inter cell connections on the back of the panel. So they produve 50% more than another psnel watt for watt.
Those buss wires are not that wide, power gains and on the order of a percent or two.
As for twice the power watt for watt.. What the heck does that mean. It’s a watt, one watt is one watt.
French success stories, tout bien ! Let us have the other half of it when it’s installed and running?
Looks like they shaded out the chance of solar + farming, but built on bedrock? Or what’s left after kaolin…
One of the most misleading articles on PV magazine.
The one can get the impression that the modules efficiency has increased with 30% since 2016 and the design of the system is so genius that adds another 55% to it.