Horry Electric, the other 19 electric cooperatives in South Carolina and Santee Cooper put the Colleton Solar Farm into operation on December 21, 2013.
Located in Colleton County, it is the largest installation in South Carolina. One of the key objectives in installing the solar array was to learn what the impact of large scale alternative energy sources might have on a utility’s distribution system.
In its first year in operation, the 15-acre site generated 4, 687 megawatt hours (MWh), which was 5 percent more than expected in year one. The extra energy was enough to power more than 1,200 60-watt light bulbs for eight hours a day.
Curious about how it’s working? Real time monitoring and statistics for The Colleton Solar Farm are available online. Be sure to click on the How Solar Works tab to learn more about the process of converting the power of the sun so it can be fed into the utility grid.