China sets BIPV record with 120 MW multi-roof solar project

According to Arctech and its inverter partner, Sungrow, the first phase of its Jiantao Base building integrated PV (BIPV) project in Gaoan, in China’s Jiangxi province, is the largest single-capacity BIPV project in the world.

The project consists of 11 sub-installations covering a total rooftop space of roughly 665,000 square meters in an industrial park. The entire project uses the CITIC Bo BIPV-Zhiro solution, and is expected to generate around 120 GWh of solar energy per year. Sungrow said the installation should meet 100% of the industrial park’s needs.

Traditional rooftop PV is the easiest solution for commercial and industrial (C&I) companies to reach their emissions reduction targets, said Arctec. But it noted that the roofs of the ceramics factories were old, and mostly made with asbestos tiles, and unable to withstand a traditional rooftop PV installation. Instead of installing new rooftops to enable PV, Arctech’s BIPV solution performs both tasks at once, by directly replacing the old roofs with a BIPV smart-roof solution.

Sungrow provided inverters for 11 separate rooftops. The company’s vice president, James Wu, described the 120 MW plant as “a milestone” in the history of BIPV.

In a January 2022 interview with pv magazine, Arctech’s general manager of international business, Allen Cao, said that BIPV has become a mainstream solution for distributed PV. In addition to the 120 MW project in Gaoan, the company has a 40.9 MW BIPV project and an 11.5 MW BIPV project in China.