At Home with Solar in Socal

SolarWorld, Hillsboro, Ore., says a 150kW PV system using its Solarkits panels that was recently installed on a Southern California home is the largest residential PV installation in the United States. The owners of the new residential solar milestone system, who have requested anonymity, placed their installation on a craggy slope along their hilltop estate in Southern California, playfully omitting a block of six solar panels to accommodate a protruding boulder. The new record-breaking system was installed by SRC Inc., an electrical contractor based in Vista, Calif. The contractor bought the panels from the Ramona, Calif., branch of Consolidated Electrical Distributors Inc. Eddie Freeman, manager of the CED-Ramona office, expects his branch's sales of SolarWorld's Sunkits to grow about 50 percent this year to approximately $1.5 million. While the 150kW system is far bigger than CED-Ramona's average 5kW Sunkits systems, Freeman forecasts that his branch's unit sales of these systems will approach 100 this year. Freeman said in a SunWorld press release that many electrical installers find Sunkits systems spare them from needing to research and master the design intricacies of optimizing solar system performance and calculating and gathering the correct type and number of system components for each project. Aside from 600 250W mono-crystalline SolarWorld Sunmodules, the system includes 15 inverters from SMA America, racking from Prosolar Professional Solar Inc., and hundreds of units of general electrical and hardware supplies.