Borrego Solar Systems Inc., a leading designer, developer, installer and financier of grid-tied solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, and sPower (Sustainable Power Group), a prominent renewable energy provider, recently commenced construction on a solar project located in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York. Upon completion, the facility, located on sPower-owned land in the Town of Riverhead, will have the capacity to produce 6.3MWac (9.1MWdc) of solar energy.
“The sPower Riverhead Solar facility has been designed to be a very clean, very safe and very quiet neighbor,” said Ryan Creamer, sPower CEO. “We are pleased that construction has begun and are confident that — together with Borrego — we’ll soon be able to start providing reliable, renewable power to PSEG-LI rate payers while creating local sustainable jobs.”
When fully operational, the sPower Riverhead solar project is expected to generate enough clean solar energy to serve the electrical needs of about 1,100 homes per year, displacing roughly 8,300 metric tons of CO2 annually. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 1,700 cars off the road, or the same amount of carbon that would be sequestered by 6,800 acres of US forests in a year.
In the works
sPower has two additional projects in Suffolk County which are currently under development with Borrego Solar slated as the engineering, procurement and construction company. The projects will supply energy to PSEG-LI under the utility’s first Clean Solar Initiative Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) program and will make sPower the owner of the largest portfolio of solar facilities under the program.
“These projects mark Borrego and sPower’s second portfolio under a utility FIT program — the first being an 8.3MW portfolio under Southern California Edison’s California Renewable Energy Small Tariff,” said Mike Hall, CEO at Borrego Solar. “Our partnership with sPower has been truly symbiotic. We look forward to building many more megawatts of solar capacity for them.”