REC Solar broke ground near the Waianae Small Boat Harbor on Wednesday on a 27.6-megawatt solar array, which when completed will be enough to power about 4,500 homes.
“By New Year’s Eve this project will be cranking power,” said Drew Bradley, REC Solar’s Hawaii regional manager.
“This solar energy project will be the largest in the state,” said Darren Pai, Hawaiian Electric Co. spokesman. “It’s great to see that it’s on track to provide more low-cost renewable energy, with all savings going straight to our customers.”
REC Solar’s groundbreaking comes after HECO terminated its contract last month with SunEdison Inc. for three utility-scale solar facilities on Oahu.
The REC and SunEdison solar farms were part of seven large-scale solar arrays HECO requested be processed under a waiver from the normal competitive bidding process by the state Public Utilities Commission. HECO sought the waiver to speed up the approval process.
The PUC denied three of the solar facilities contracts. HECO canceled three, leaving the REC Solar project as the only one of the seven that remains active.
HECO will purchase the power from the Waianae solar facility for 14.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. The owner of the facility is Eurus Energy America, a renewable-energy projects operator owned by Toyota Tsusho Corp. and Tokyo Electric Power Co.
Bradley said he would love to take over the development of the three solar farms SunEdison was building.
“We would love to build out more projects and we have plenty of capital to do it,” Bradley said. “We would love to get that call from HECO. … Hopefully, there will be another attempt to replace those projects.”
HECO said the utility decided to cancel the contracts with SunEdison because of the company’s financial situation.
REC Solar’s facility is located on 198 acres of low-value agricultural land. The solar panels are on a horizontal single-axis tracker design, which rotates to follow the sun.
REC Solar also built the Anahola solar array on Kauai that is owned by Kauai Island Utility Cooperative. The 12-megawatt system cost $54 million and began producing power in September. The array consists of 59,000 panels.
