At 800 kW, the hotel solar installation in the Caribbean we built for The Westin Dawn Beach Resort & Spa in St. Maarten is the largest hospitality system OneWorld Solar has delivered. It is the project we point to when a resort operator asks whether an array of that scale can be put on a property that never closes, on an island where every component arrives in a shipping container.
A resort is an unusually good host for solar. The load is genuinely round the clock, the summer cooling peak lines up with the sunniest part of the year, and the roofs are large, flat and mostly free of the process equipment that clutters an industrial building. What changes the arithmetic here is not the building. It is the grid it sits on.
Why island power economics are different
Most Caribbean islands generate electricity from imported fuel. The cost of that fuel, the cost of shipping it and the exposure to interruption all land in the rate the resort pays, which is why island power is generally both more expensive and less predictable than power on the mainland Southeast. A system size that would look marginal in Georgia can look straightforward on an island rate.
The second factor is reliability. Grid interruptions are a service issue at a resort in a way they are not at a warehouse, because the guest experiences them directly. That is the reason resort projects so often end up in a conversation about islandable microgrid design rather than a plain grid-tied array.
Island tariffs and interconnection rules change
Every island utility sets its own rate structure, its own interconnection requirements and its own rules on exporting to the grid, and all three change. Nothing on this page should be treated as the current rate or the current rule set for St. Maarten. Confirm them before modeling a project.
What we built
800 kW
Rooftop photovoltaic array
Largest hospitality system OneWorld Solar has built.
Operating resort
Built without closing the property
Work sequenced around occupancy.
St. Maarten
Island site
All equipment shipped in by sea.
Three constraints shaped the delivery more than anything else.
Wind is the governing load. On a Caribbean roof the array is designed from the site's design wind speed backwards: module clamps, rails, attachment spacing, and then the roof structure itself. The weakest link in that chain sets the rating for the whole array, so the structural review has to include the existing building, not just the racking that is bolted to it.
Shipping is a schedule item, not a purchase order. Everything arrives by container. There is no supply house down the road to cover a shortfall, so the bill of material has to be complete before it ships, spares travel with the main order, and customs and port clearance are planned as activities with durations attached.
The resort keeps trading. Guest-facing work is the part most contractors underestimate. Access routes, lift and delivery windows, noise curfews and the outage window for the electrical tie-in all get agreed with the operator up front. Our full commercial solar EPC scope exists partly so there is one party responsible for holding that plan together instead of three subcontractors negotiating it live.
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.
What can be said without qualification is the scale and the class of problem: 800 kW of rooftop generation on an operating beachfront resort, on an island, engineered for Caribbean wind.
One honest note on incentives. The 30% federal investment tax credit, Section 179 and bonus depreciation are United States tax provisions. A property in St. Maarten is generally outside their scope, and any local incentive is a question for the resort's own tax advisor rather than for its solar contractor.
If you operate a resort in the islands
- The same design approach is described in solar for hotels and resorts.
- For regional context, see commercial solar installation in the Caribbean.
- Systems at every scale, from 15 kW to 1.267 MW, are collected in commercial solar projects.
- If the property is in the US or a US territory, the commercial solar incentives that apply are worth checking early, because they change the size of system that makes sense.