The 451.5 kW ground mount array OneWorld Solar built for the Virgin Islands Port Authority on St. Thomas is a public sector solar project in the Virgin Islands that had to satisfy two audiences at once: the engineers who would operate it, and the procurement process that had to justify the award in public.
Public authorities are among the better candidates for solar. They occupy their buildings for decades, they are not going to relocate, they hold land, and they answer to constituents who read the utility bill as a line in a public budget. What they do not have is the freedom to negotiate a scope informally.
What makes a public authority project different
The specification comes first. An authority publishes what it wants, takes competing bids against that document and must be able to defend the award later. That inverts the usual sequence: the engineering, the structural calculations and the interconnection technical data all have to be complete and defensible at bid stage rather than developed once the contract is signed.
This is one of the reasons we run projects as a single commercial solar EPC contract. When one party holds the design, the procurement and the construction, the document the authority evaluated is the same document that gets built. Our VP of Engineering, Chris Sandifer, is a licensed Professional Engineer and a NABCEP board-certified photovoltaic system inspector, which matters when the deliverable is a stamped package that a public body will publish.
Designing for a coastal hurricane zone
451.5 kW
Ground mount array
Built for a public authority on St. Thomas.
Coastal site
Salt-air environment
Corrosion drives material and coating choices.
Hurricane zone
Wind governs the structure
Design starts from site wind speed.
Two environmental conditions drove the design, and both of them are about durability rather than output.
Salt air. A coastal ground mount is exposed from grade upward, and salt attacks every fastener, every dissimilar-metal joint and every enclosure penetration. The response is unglamorous and mostly invisible in a photograph: material and coating specifications chosen for the environment, dissimilar metals isolated at connections, enclosure ratings selected for a marine setting. It costs more at construction and it is the difference between a twenty-year asset and a ten-year one.
Wind. In a hurricane zone the array is engineered from the site's design wind speed back through the modules, the clamps, the rails and the foundations. On a ground mount the foundations are the item that most often gets under-designed, because they are the part nobody sees on a finished site.
What we will not tell you about this site
We are not publishing production, savings or availability figures for this project. The capacity and mounting type here come from the previous OneWorld Solar website and predate our current records. Ask us for the verified data rather than working from a number on a web page.
The results
OneWorld Solar has not published production or bill-savings figures for this installation. The scope described above is what the company confirms; anything beyond it should come from OneWorld Solar directly.
On incentives, one point is worth stating carefully. The U.S. Virgin Islands is a United States territory, so federal programs such as the 30% commercial solar tax credit may be relevant to a project there. Whether any of it applies to a specific entity depends on that entity's tax position and on the rules in force at the time. A public authority has a very different posture from a private company. That determination belongs to the customer's tax advisor, not to us.
Where to go next
- Other work of this scale is collected in our commercial solar projects in the Southeast and Caribbean.
- The regional picture is set out in commercial solar installation in the Caribbean.
- If continuity of supply is part of the brief, read commercial microgrid installation.
- For US and US-territory owners weighing net cost, start with Section 179 solar depreciation.