RPCS, Today’s Power Strengthen Solar Partnership in Arkansas

RP Construction Services Inc. (RPCS), a solar tracker project design, engineering and installation subcontractor based in Monterey, Calif., says it has strengthened its partnership with electric cooperative subsidiary Today’s Power Inc. (TPI) with their 2020 portfolio of solar projects to be built in TPI’s home state of Arkansas.

The projects, totaling more than 5 MW DC, will be supplied and installed in partnership with RPCS. All will feature DuraTrack HZ v3 single-axis solar trackers by Array Technologies. Array’s mounting technology keeps the modules following the sun on its course throughout the day, ensuring up to a 20% to 25% increase in energy production over fixed-tilt systems.

Today’s Power, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Little Rock-based utility service cooperative Arkansas Electric Cooperatives Inc. (AECI), will receive RPCS’s turnkey service and support throughout the design and installation processes.

The newly established 2020 pipeline comes in the wake of recently completed projects built under the RPCS-TPI partnership, including the Fayetteville East and Fayetteville West projects in Fayetteville, Ark., totaling over 11 MW. These TPI projects include the first solar-coupled battery energy storage systems in the Mid-South and the largest solar array on municipal land in Arkansas.

Other projects, namely those for the City of Paris, Ark., and for Southland Gin, a cotton gin, will soon be underway and are expected to be completed in the spring and summer, respectively, of 2020. The 1 MW Southland Gin project, which will be owned and operated by Today’s Power, will consist in part of a DuraTrack HZ v3 single-axis tracking system. The array will also feature on-site battery storage, using battery backups for power savings during peak demand, reducing the load on the overall system.