Hire Electric installs Washington's largest solar-powered charging station

Hire Electric's solar charging station in Richland, WA

Earlier this week, General Motors provided a video tour of its recently installed solar-powered charging station at its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant, the birthplace of the 2011 Chevrolet Volt. Though GM's 18.2 kW solar array is certainly impressive, it can't match the enormous 126 kW rig installed in Richland, WA.

Hire Electric, a contracting firm serving the Pacific Northwest, took an old water retention swale and outfitted it with 528 SolarWorld SW240 modules, a Satcon 110-S inverter, DECK monitoring, SunStorage's GroundMount racking system and 12 Coulomb ChargePoint Level 2 plug-in vehicle charging stations. The installation was completed in mid-November and Hire Electric claims that this setup is the, "largest net-metered solar array in Washington state." The array is projected to generate up to 175,000 kWh of electricity per year, which works out to be enough juice to provide around 700,000 miles of solar-powered driving for the plug-in vehicles that pull in and charge up. Hat tip to Jonathan!