Imagine a farm that requires no workers and where every day is harvest.
That’s what is happening on a 21-acre parcel near the Lowndes County Industrial Park, where the day’s crop of sunshine has been collected since January.
The county’s first “solar farms” are meeting all expectations, says Matt Beasley, senior vice president of Nashville, Tennessee-based Silicon Ranch Corp., which owns and operates the small-scale solar power plant.
“The operation is going just as expected,” Beasley said Thursday. “We haven’t had any real problems through the first eight months of operations. We’re meeting all our projections, which was the production of 1.6 megawatts.”
Beasley said the power generated at the two farms is enough to provide power to 200 homes. State law limits production from any single solar energy provider to 1-megawatts.
The two facilities are equipped with 5,000 single access tracking panels, which “follow” the path of the sun throughout daylight hours then reset when the sun goes down.
The electricity produced by the solar farms is connected to TVA’s power grid by 4-County Electric.
The facility is a collaboration among Silicon Ranch, TVA, 4-County Electric Power Association and the Lowndes County Industrial Development Authority.
It is part of TVA’s Solar Solutions Initiative, a program designed to promote cost-competitive renewable energy while helping attract new industry to the area.
The project was approved by the state Public Service Commission in May 2015, and installation and set-up began that September. The solar farms began producing energy in early January.
Beasley said his company has no full-time employees on the site.
“One of the good things about solar farms is they require very little maintenance,” he said. “We have contract workers available if anything goes wrong and we use them for scheduled maintenance. But other than that, there really isn’t any need for anyone to be on-site.”
Silicon Ranch currently has more than 25 active solar farms around the country, totaling more than 130 megawatts,” Beasley said.
“We have more than twice that figure under engineering and construction, including some in Mississippi that we are working on.
The two farms in Lowndes County are among the company’s 10 farms in Mississippi, with 79 megawatts in capacity, including farms in Hattiesburg, Okolona, Houston and New Albany.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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