The site had three possible roofs the panels could go on and if using mainstream panels all three roofs would be required. We offered such a design using 200 panels like the other 4 companies offering a tender. On first view this seemed a competitive offering.
However, there was further consideration to make. A difference here was CEW is made of a group of shareholders who all invest money in community renewable energy systems that provide free or reduced cost electricity to the building owner with the knowledge their investment is rewarded by the Feed-in Tariff income.
With this in mind we also offered a second tender which although more expensive in capital outlay offered a number of added benefits. Firstly we only needed to use two roofs as our design used World leading SunPower E20 327w panels; 49.70kWp from only 152 panels as their efficiency is 20.1%. Secondly the SunPower module has a number of world leading characteristics including the lowest degradation rate, no light induced degradation, market leading temperature coefficients as well as operating well under low lights levels. Finally this is all backed up by a combined 25 year Product & Performance warranty. This all means CEW could be safe in investing in a system that was going to generate energy at the highest rate from day 1 and keep on performing at a rate above any other panel for a guaranteed 25 years.
In 2014 we were awarded the project ahead of four other companies with the most expensive design as CEW could see the benefits from their investment.
The panels and three SMA Tri-Power inverters were installed over 7 days with commissioning on 10th June 2014.
So has the investment paid off? The system is monitored via Sunny Portal and on the 6th month anniversary the system had generated 32,000kWh of electricity; some 70% of the estimated 43,000kWh annual generation.
