Mushrooms do not normally need much help from the sun but nearly 5,000 solar panels have popped up alongside buildings that house white button mushrooms in West Grove, Pennsylvania. Marlboro Mushrooms, the oldest family mushroom farm in the country, has added a 1.13 megawatt (MW) solar array to help offset energy costs. North Carolina-based Southern Energy Management (SEM) installed the SunPower solar photovoltaic (PV) system.
According to Marlboro Mushrooms’ Tom Brosius, “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. It is great to harvest the sun’s power and take advantage of a renewable resource. We anticipate it will generate 100% of our annual electric needs.”
Spread across nearly 7 acres (~2.8 hectares), the installation deploys SunPower’s T0 tracking system, which uses global positioning system (GPS) technology to ensure that all 4,953 of the SunPower 228-watt modules are always tracking the sun.
“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,” explained Harold Brosius.
Construction of the ground-mounted array had a short turnaround time: Crews started work on the installation in late August 2011 and had the entire system online by the end of November 2011, a full three weeks ahead of schedule.
Source: Solarnovus
