Acciona Builds 46 Solar Megawatts in Portugal

The US may have recently become the world’s largest wind power producer, but it’s the Europeans who are still building the biggest solar power plants. Acciona, a Spanish engineering and construction organization, just built a 46 MW photovoltaic behemoth in Portugal.

This juggernaut is big, powerful and expensive. It cost about $367 million dollars (that’s just under $8 per watt, for those who tuned into last week’s discussion of grid parity), and is made up of 250 THOUSAND solar modules, with approximately one solar tracker for each 100 modules.

One of the cool things about this new plant is that it is not owned by just one organization. Rather, a number of different organizations each owns a piece of the 46 MW total, and they all agreed to build together in a common site. Economies of scale would dictate that the resulting whole would be more efficient than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes we get so used to hearing the latest, biggest number that we don’t fully appreciate the scale of projects like this when they actually come online. We have to remember that clean tech is still just a child, and these 46 megawatts are the latest scratches on the wall to show how tall it has grown. As we change the calendars, we can’t help but notice that solar – though it is not all grown up yet – has certainly gone through a growth spurt.

Via Earth2Tech

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