PV System Reduces Electricity Costs in Namibia’s Largest Shopping Mall
A hotel, a cinema, a health and fitness center and numerous shops and restaurants: These amenities are spread over around 52,000 square meters in Namibia’s largest shopping mall. They are all voracious consumers of energy and are now benefiting from the installation of a PV system with 43 SMA inverters.
The newly installed PV system has a capacity of 2.816 megawatts. In the first year, the system will generate around 4,844 megawatt hours of cost-effective green electricity for self-consumption at the shopping mall in Windhoek, the country’s capital city. As the region is known for its high irradiation values, the shopping paradise’s electricity costs will continue to fall dramatically in the years to come.
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- The newly installed PV system on Namibia’s largest shopping mall has a capacity of 2.816 megawatts.
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- The installation consists of 43 solar inverters of SMA.
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- Sunset over solar panels.
8,600 polycrystalline PV modules are mounted on a total of ten roofs with an area of 18,000 square meters. Thanks to OptiTrac, the operation management system integrated into the inverters, their strings can be grouped to ensure the ideal design of the system. This generates the highest energy yields at all times.
Space for maintenance and cleaning
A structural engineer inspected the roofs closely before the PV system was installed. After all, they have to bear an additional weight of approximately 15 kilograms per square meter. All modules are positioned to ensure that there is enough room between the rows for cleaning and maintenance work.
All SMA solutions for commercial PV systems for supermarkets, companies, hotels and more can be found here.
This article could be interesting for you, too: Why Supermarkets Should Switch to Renewable Energy
The company Sustainable Power Solutions (Pty) Ltd., based in South Africa, constructed the PV system within five months and commissioned it in August 2018.
You did tell them that they can value add by offsetting their carbon emissions?
Which here in Australia you can get credits for also this helps value add.
It makes a difference when carbon tax kicks in.
Good luck on your quest our hopes are with you Helga.
All the best to everyone for the festive season.
Thanks for the information, I live in Alaska. While our periods of sunshine are not as long, we can add wind to the equation. I have been trying to convince our local government to convert or supplement all public buildings with solar and or wind. No luck so far!
Hi Helga,
Sorry to hear that your local government isn´t convinced yet. But your dedication is absolutely right. There were already some lighthouse projects in Alaska, like in Anchorage, that prove the efficiency of solar power. Two years ago we published a blog post about PV plants in Alaska. I´m sorry that it is available only in German; but in the article you can find a helpful link to a study “Solar Energy Prospecting in Remote Alaska”. I´ll keep my fingers crossed that you´ll be heard very soon.
Sunny regards, Anke