- A stadium in Senegal is being powered by renewable energy.
- Citus Power built the plant.
Turkey-based renewable energy developer Citus Power has concluded construction on a 2.3 MW solar carport at the Stadium in Dakar, Senegal.
The company initiated work on the facility in December 2021 and built it with 77 independent structures that each contain 66 solar modules. Eren Ulusoy, business development manager, in a statement to PV magazine, said, “It took almost two months to complete the whole solar PV system installation. The stadium has two different and independent grid inputs, so there are two different electrical circuits inside the stadium. Therefore, the PV system had to be split into two independent arrays with a power of 700kW and 1.4MW, respectively, to feed different sides of the stadium.”
The system was built with 21 Sungrow 110CX 110 kW inverters and 5,112 Trina Solar TSM-450DE17M(II) 450W modules. “It can operate in both on-grid and off-grid mode,” Ulusoy said. “There are also seven diesel generators, and these generators work with solar PV systems when a power outage occurs.”
According to Ulusoy, the solar array currently produces more energy than its consumption but is not selling excess power to the grid. “The system can do it, but it’s not allowed by the local authority yet,” he said.