Re-selling or Re-purposing a Solar Farm

[bcroe]

a 200kw, ground ballast mounted farm will easily fit on less than one acre. We already have the site survey complete and a quote using 325kw panels and it will conservatively cover about .75 - 1acre. I know you mentioned you have buildings and such but we will have no such structures (above ground).

Understand, that clouds in the sky and shadows on the ground are DEVASTATING to solar production. Shadows
are less of a problem at the equator. But here at 42 deg latitude the solar array must be backed away from trees
on my neighbors lots, as well some of my own, living around people, trees, and livestock. The open space takes
a lot more space than the panels. And at this latitude arrays must be broken into sections to allow a good angle of
incidence. So I must have some 23 feet of space for each 10 feet of panels, to avoid the array shadowing itself.
And weather takes a serious hit on output. All these things may go away if you are in the desert at the equator.

I suppose those are 325W panels, not 325KW. Bruce Roe

[J.P.M.]

I'd have to disagree there. I went to some pretty good technical universities (both undergrad and grad) and while I learned the basics of electronics there, I learned almost zero about siting, designing, specifying, installing and maintaining solar power systems. That I learned largely by doing, often through trial and error (which I would not recommend.) Forums like this can help to avoid such haphazard training mechanisms, no matter what your technical background.

Understood, and mostly agree with you with respect to the limited value of formal (classroom) education which seems to be best used for learning how to think like an engineer using the formal preliminary details and concepts which are best used as examples and only means to the end of the process of learning to think like an engineer rather than an end in themselves.

FWIW, the last half of my post got truncated somehow. I suggested the OP contact/contract with an engineering/construction outfit that does MW size solar projects as one way to a successful outcome.

I probably could have worded it differently. But scoping and running a project this size is not something that can be done without more experience than the OP seems to have, classroom or otherwise. Coming here without the experience and real life training that comes after tech. ed. and expecting a lot of correct, much less complete detail seems to me a bit like expecting a good outcome from being on the 10th floor and trying to get into an elevator that's already gone up 4 feet or so while blindfolded.

This and other forums can fill in details and tell you things your mother or classrooms didn't, but IMO, such forum formats, not unlike u-tube videos, make poor how-to-manuals. Isolated details from what are semi or entirely anonymous sources as is usual from the limited format of a forum can be incomplete, incorrect and therefore dangerous.

I'd respectfully suggest relying on such sources of information is itself haphazard. If I had run projects in that manner when still working, I would have been run off the project like a dirty shirt and rightfully so. I suspect the same would happen to you. If I needed help, which was often, I sought out responsible professionals, not anonymous unvetted opinion. You, I, or anyone can pretty much say anything they want around here right, wrong or anything in between without consequence.

As a cautious example, having read and interacted with Bruce for 4+ years here, my guess is he, or someone with his experience could probably handle running a project such as the OP describes and get an opinion or detail or two here if he chose, but he'd handle most of the details from experience. I'm not so sure about the OP.

Respectfully,