The Sacramento Kings have announced the completion of their 700kW rooftop array on top of their Golden 1 Center home arena. The venue will be the first indoor sports arena to have its entire energy supply sourced from solar, with a 700kW rooftop array, combined with energy supplied from the Rancho Seco solar farm 40 miles away, powering the stadium which can house nearly 20,000 fans. The arena’s rooftop array employs Sungrow’s SG60KU-M string inverters. The project was co-developed by AES Distributed Energy and SPI Solar and the Golden 1 Center’s rooftop plant will help save over 2,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year. For this reason, the Golden 1 Center is the first indoor sports arena to earn a LEED Platinum Certification, which is the highest designation for an award that is given for buildings that are energy and resource-efficient.
The Kings solar project is part of “NBA 3.0”, a business philosophy coined by Kings majority owner Vivek Ranadive which encourages investments in “technology, globalization, and community partnerships”. Their investment in renewable energy generation is part of the Kings’ initiative to be environmentally friendly. “We are glad to be supporting continued efforts by the NBA and its franchises to go green. Sungrow is proud to be involved in this project and applaud the Kings’ leadership in the fight against climate change,” exclaimed Professor Renxian Cao, President of Sungrow. Sungrow is a world’s leading PV inverter manufacturer. It is committed to technical innovation and its newest 1500VDC string inverter SG125HV unveiled at SPI 2016 is designed to combine the command-and-control advantages of a central inverter with the flexibility and low-cost of string inverters.
