Napa Valley College solar field reported taken offline after leakage concern

What happened

A photovoltaic array of about 1.2 MW at Napa Valley College, inaugurated in April 2006, is reported to have been taken out of service after roughly 15 years and to now sit idle and overgrown. A college spokesperson told The Press Democrat that the panels were decommissioned when a campus fuel cell came online because they had started leaking and posed a fire hazard, and that the maintenance contractor, SunPower, was unavailable.

The paper says the exact date is not clear from college records, that payments to SunPower for maintenance continued until February 2021, and that SunPower had not filed for bankruptcy by then. In 2018 SunPower identified a wiring fault and charged the college $160,000 for repairs. Output had already fallen by 2017. No fire, injury or emergency response is described.

Contributing factors

The source describes ageing equipment, a repaired wiring fault, rising maintenance costs and falling output. It also reports a college account of panel leakage and loss of contractor support, which the article says is hard to reconcile with the public record on SunPower. A single cause is not established.

Lessons learned

1. A solar array with falling output and a repaired wiring fault needs continued monitoring even after a contractor leaves.
2. When maintenance support ends, owners must verify panel condition themselves before deciding to decommission.

More lessons on worker safety and safe systems of work, maintenance, inspection and ageing assets, from every incident on the register.

Not yet known

• Exact date the array was taken offline
• Root cause of the reported leakage
• Model and age of the panels

This entry is updated when these are reported. Get an alert for the next one like it.

Source

pressdemocrat.com