Orange County Convention Center doubles solar
- SolarEdge and Advanced Green Technologies completed a 2.2-megawatt rooftop solar repowering at Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center, more than doubling output without expanding roof space. - The upgrade replaced the center’s 19-year-old array, and 5,800 removed panels were redistributed to more than 120 Florida residents, businesses, and nonprofits. - The project turns an early-2000s solar install into one of Florida’s larger rooftop arrays. (solarpowerworldonline.com)
Orange County Convention Center has finished a 2.2-megawatt rooftop solar repowering project in Orlando, more than doubling the venue’s solar generation in the same roof footprint. (solarpowerworldonline.com) (energytech.com) SolarEdge supplied the inverters and power optimizers, and Advanced Green Technologies installed the new system after removing the center’s original array. The project was celebrated on April 24, 2026, at an Orange County Convention Center event called the Great Solar Celebration. (energytech.com) (solarpowerworldonline.com) The new array uses Hanwha Q CELLS modules and SolarEdge equipment across multiple roof zones. EnergyTech reported the design was engineered around an 800-foot rooftop span while keeping the building open and on its normal event schedule. (solarpowerworldonline.com) (energytech.com) This was not a brand-new solar build so much as a repowering, a swap of older equipment for newer hardware that produces more electricity from the same space. The convention center’s prior rooftop panels had been in service for 19 years before they were taken down. (energytech.com) (occc.net) The center and its partners kept the removed panels out of the waste stream. Orange County Convention Center and Orlando nonprofit IDEAS For Us gave away 5,800 decommissioned panels on February 1 and 2, 2025, to 120 residents, organizations, and businesses. (occc.net) (solarpowerworldonline.com) Orange County Convention Center says it hosts about 200 events a year and draws roughly 1.5 million attendees, generating about $3.9 billion in annual economic impact for Central Florida. Trade publication coverage of the solar project described the rooftop array as one of the larger installations of its kind in Florida. (occc.net) (solarpowerworldonline.com) The project also updates one of Florida’s earlier high-profile convention-center solar installs with current equipment instead of adding new roof area. Advanced Green Technologies executive Clinton Sockman said his company had looked up to the original project nearly 20 years ago before returning to rebuild it at more than double the capacity. (solarpowerworldonline.com) For the convention center, the result is a bigger solar system on the same roof and a public case study in replacing first-generation panels without sending thousands of usable modules to a landfill. (solarpowerworldonline.com) (occc.net)
