Electricity: The Lifeblood of America
Once manufactured, First Solar ships its solar panels to sites around the country where engineers and construction workers install them in large-scale solar power plants, using components such as mounting structures, cabling, and inverters often sourced from other American companies.
Beyond solar manufacturing, construction, and operations ecosystems, clean solar electricity is helping drive prosperity in other industries. In many instances, large-scale solar power plants supply the energy needs of America’s largest, most innovative companies, supporting data centers that form the backbone of social media networks and the cloud, which in turn create hi-tech jobs. In others, they give American ranchers an additional source of revenue by leasing a portion of their land to build large-scale solar power plants while protecting local ecosystems. And they even allow farmers the opportunity to graze their sheep under the arrays, keeping the sheep happy and allowing their shepherds to benefit from supplemental income.
"I worked on the Sun Stream 2 project before this and they ended up sending me to Georgia to build a site, then to Texas for another one, then I went to Battle Creek Michigan, then back to Arizona to work on this Sun Stream project.
This one's probably the biggest site that I've been on. It has 69 blocks whereas most I've worked on have around 50. A block is a section of solar panels, each section has a series of lines of panels. And each line has a variety of single double or triple panels in a line. On this site alone
so far, we've installed around 660,000 panels. As our crew ramps up, we try and
hit a minimum of 5,500 panels installed each day."
Bryston 'Smiley' Brown | Installation Foreman | Sun Streams Solar Farm, Arlington, Arizona
Workers install First Solar’s Series 6 Plus solar panels at Longroad Energy’s Sun Streams Solar Farm in Arlington, Arizona.