Highest capacity concentrating photovoltaic power station

The Alamosa Solar facility in San Luis Valley, Colorado, USA, is the world’s largest concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) power plant, with an installed capacity of 30 MW. Developed by Cogentrix Energy and opened in 2012, the station exploits the high sunlight levels of a high-altitude location 7,800 ft above sea level, covering 225 acres. The project boasts 504 dual-axis CPV Amonix 7700 tracker assemblies, each of which measures 21 m wide and 15 m high and deploys 7,560 Fresnel lenses to boost the power of the sunlight by a factor of 500. The sun’s rays are then focused on to multijunction gallium arsenide photovoltaic cells, originally developed as part of the US space programme. Providing enough power for 6,500 local homes, when compared to a conventional natural gas–fired power plant Alamosa Solar eliminates approximately 43,250 tons of CO2 each year. Concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) systems use lenses or mirrors to focus sunlight onto solar photovoltaic cells, which can then be smaller than the flat-panels used in the more conventional and more common solar farms. However, in order to concentrate sunlight onto a small cell area, the CPV’s optics, tracking and other systems normally make them much more expensive.