Officials from NASA and Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) commission FPL’s Space Coast Next Generation Solar Energy Center last Thursday.
The new 10-megawatts (MW) solar photovoltaic (PV) power facility is located on NASA property at Kennedy Space Center and is the result of a public-private partnership between NASA and FPL.
The facility features approximately 35,000 solar PV panels from SunPower
Corp. (Nasdaq: SPWRA; SPWRB)on
60 acres at Kennedy Space Center.
SunPower designed and built the system and a separate
one-megawatt solar power system at Kennedy Space Center, as well as
FPL’s 25-megawatt DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in DeSoto
County, the largest operating solar PV power plant in the U.S.
SunPower
intends to locate a research and development center employing up to 50
employees in Florida if the state government continues to support the
deployment of additional large-scale solar energy projects.
Later this year, FPL plans to open the world’s first hybrid solar
thermal facility to connect to an existing fossil fuel plant, FPL’s
Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Indiantown, Fla. It will
be the largest of FPL’s solar facilities at 75 MW. In total, FPL’s three
solar projects combined are creating more than 1,500 direct solar jobs
and more than 5,000 total jobs for the state during the construction
period.
“Projects like this and our Next Generation Solar Energy Centers in Martin and DeSoto Counties give Florida the opportunity to create and attract clean-energy jobs and produce millions of dollars in new revenue for local governments while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fighting the effects of climate change at the same time,” said FPL President and CEO Armando J. Olivera.
FPL’s Space Coast Next Generation Solar Energy Center is expected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 227,000 tons over the life of the project, which according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is equivalent to removing 1,800 cars from the road each year. It will also save approximately 122,000 barrels of oil and 2.8 billion cubic feet of natural gas over its lifetime.
FPL is a subsidiary of Juno Beach, Fla.-based FPL Group, Inc. (NYSE: FPL). In March, the FPL Group announced plans to change its name to NextEra Energy, Inc.
