Tanquinho Solar Photovoltaic Plant

On Tuesday we visited the largest PV plant in Brazil, and the first in the state of Sao Paulo.


Usina Solar Tanquinho (Tanquinho Solar Plant)
Located in Campinas, about 1.5 hours away from our hostel in SP
1.1 MW Peak Installed Capacity
0.19 MW Average Output

The plant cost 13.8M reais (US $6.6M) and was built during a span of 4 months last summer, and has been operational for the past 9 months.

The amount of power it produces (190 kW on average) is tiny compared with most oil, gas, or hydroelectric plants.In fact, it only produces a few hundred dollars worth of electricity per day, (US $240,000/year if customer cost was US $0.15/kWh)

But the engineers at Tanquinho are using the plant to test out solar PV technology. It's clear photovoltaics aren't profitable yet, but by trying out different designs and systems, they are building knowledge and experience in how to operate a photovoltaic plant. Future larger scale plants will be able to build off what has been done at Tanquinho.

There are different types of panels being tested (amorphous silicon  vs polycristaline, both shown below) and sun-tracking vs fixed, etc.

They look at not only which design is the most efficient, but in practice, which style provides the highest level of reliability and durability, the lowest maintenance, and the lowest cost. 

Technology 1: Amorphous Silicon panels

Technology 2: Polycrystalline panels

The mechanism for sun tracking. This electric motor (made in the US, woohoo) moves these rows of Chinese panels incrementally each 5 minutes to line up best with the direct sunlight. 

The man that showed us around was very nice, and gave us a good look at what they do there at Tanquinho. His English was a little shaky, but he was able to get across his points, and answer the questions we asked surprisingly well. 

 I thought it was pretty cool that we got to get right in there and walk along the rows of panels.

The surrounding landscape looked pretty empty, even though we were only a few miles from civilization.

CPFL Energias is a Brazilian utility company. CPFL Renovaveis is their renewable energy division, which deals mainly with small hydroelectric plants and wind farms. This solar project is a fairly new thing for them. 

In conclusion, although the plant is minor electricity producer, CPFL is building a knowledge base with this plant with which they will use to improve the technology and likely design larger PV plants in the future. It also helps build a supply chain for materials and trains workers for maintaining photovoltaic systems. So this relatively small plant represents a big step towards solar photovoltaics in Brazil.