Bozeman Solar - Community Solar Study

The Bozeman Solar Project is a partnership with the City of Bozeman, Montana State University, and NorthWestern Energy. Located on approximately 2.1 acres of land, the Bozeman Solar project is providing enough renewable energy to power more than 60 homes. This project will be able to evaluate long-term sustainable models for the integration of renewable energy while providing the City of Bozeman with data to better understand how they can meet their community climate action plan. Montana State University is using the project for senior design research. 

The grid-connected project uses an array of ground-mounted photovoltaic panels, smart inverters, and an automation controller to understand how inverter functions can be used to better integrate with the grid. The project also involves the installation of advanced metering that captures 15 minute interval data on 40 residential customers, 20 commercial customers, and 1 industrial customer to help understand how solar output aligns with how users are consuming energy. This data is streamed to the project dashboard. Also, two panels with micro-inverters and adjustable racking allows the entire array to be modeled as if it were at different orientations. This orientation modeling is one of MSU’s senior design projects.