World's largest solar test facility operating in Aurora

Six public and private sector entities, all with interest in advancing and accelerating the commercialization of solar technology, joined forces to develop one of the world's largest solar test and evaluation facilities in Colorado. Leveraging the exceptional solar resources already in existence in Colorado, the development site, Solar Technology Acceleration Center (SolarTAC), began operation in October 2009 in Aurora.

The entities involved in SolarTAC include: Abengoa Solar, the city of Aurora, the Colorado Renewable Energy Collaboratory, Midwest Research Institute (MRI), SunEdison, and Xcel Energy.

SolarTAC provides a solar facility where member companies can bring their technologies for testing and demonstration, particularly solar technologies at the early commercial or near-commercial stage of development. SolarTAC also helps promote better interface between technology developers and solar energy users by offering solar equipment suppliers an opportunity to show potential customers new technologies performing under actual field conditions. MRI will serve as the management and operating contractor for SolarTAC.

In addition to the founding member companies, MRI, who is one of two entities in the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, that manages the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, plans to recruit about a dozen other companies to participate as founding members in SolarTAC.

"Our objective is to provide a highly flexible, real-world test situation with dedicated, custom test sites for leading-edge companies," said Mike Pacheco, MRI vice president and acting executive director for SolarTAC. "We look forward to building a base of companies that have synergies with one another and will collaborate to test, validate, and demonstrate new technologies and fully integrated commercial-ready systems leading to deployment into the marketplace more efficiently and effectively."

The SolarTAC business concept allows members to sponsor a wide-range of research projects, from research that is completely proprietary to research that is shared between members to research that is available to the public. SolarTAC is also open to research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and by federal labs such as NREL.

The members of SolarTAC have all agreed to partner with the State of Colorado and the four major research institutions that make up the Colorado Renewable Energy Collaboratory—Colorado State University, Colorado School of Mines, University of Colorado-Boulder (CU), and NREL.

As part of the partnership, the Collaboratory institutions will be invited to participate in planning SolarTAC activities and respond to Requests for Research Proposals. Colorado's universities and NREL will be engaged to complement the applied testing and demonstration work in Aurora with more fundamental scientific research at each of the four institutions. "This is just one more important step forward in positioning Colorado as a world leader in renewable energy technology development," said David Hiller, executive director of the Collaboratory.

In the initial phase, SolarTac's 74-acre site, scheduled to be developed over the next three years, will include common areas to be used for performance validation testing of new solar energy system components for which the costs and results will be shared by all SolarTAC companies, as well as custom-made, company-specific test sites for proprietary testing by member companies.