Sterling & Wilson brings 125MW bifacial solar plant online in Oman

• EPC firm Sterling & Wilson has completed its initial solar PV job in Oman, a 125MW DC plant making use of bifacial panels, with the India-headquartered company entering its 10th gigawatt of tasks worldwide.

Sterling & Wilson introduced the Amin Solar PV project's completion recently. The EPC company, which stated it has actually now worked on 9.2 GW of solar tasks worldwide, claims to also be the first Indian company to appoint a solar PV task in the Middle Eastern nation.

Amin Renewable Energy Company-- a consortium led by Japanese conglomerate Marubeni-- acquired Sterling & Wilson to perform the task, with neighborhood partners Bahwan Engineering Group, Oman Oil Facilities Development Company (OOFDC) as well as Modern Channel Services (MCS). Marubeni offered 50.1% of equity, OOFDC 30%, Bahwan 10% and also MCS 9.9%. Marubeni said in February 2019 that it had actually signed a 23-year power acquisition contract (PPA) for the plant's result with Petroleum Development Oman.

Sterling & Wilson said the Amin project lies on "extreme rocky ground conditions," which needed using 165 items of earth-moving equipment at the website to excavate 100km of cabling trenches.

Utilizing bifacial panels and also single-axis trackers-- an innovation mix lately highlighted as one of the most cost-effective for solar PV tasks in most of the world by Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS)-- the Amin Solar PV project is believed to additionally be among Oman's very first significant solar tasks. It will nonetheless be complied with by a much-larger, US$ 400 million, 500MWac plant presently under growth by a consortium led by ACWA Power, which got to economic enclose March this year.

Chinese module distributor Jolywood just recently said it is shipping PV components to that task, Ibri II, while Sungrow is supplying inverters. Jolywood likewise claimed it supplied N-type bifacial PV modules to a 125MW task in Oman, thought to be the Amin task. In a recent meeting with PV Tech for a blog site concerning Chinese major gamers making invasions into the Middle East market, Jolywood's Middle East primary Zhipeng Liu claimed that tasks in the region are "primarily massive installations of over 100MW with plenty of smaller ones."

"It is very interesting to do organisation right here - either you get a huge task or nothing in any way," Liu stated.