The Saginaw Spirits, a farm-league hockey team in Saginaw, Mich., which recently sent four players to the National Hockey League, will soon be playing under lights powered by the Dow Event Center’s new solar array. The center is installing a 34-kilowatt photovoltaic array that should be completed by Sept. 15.

The project is supported through a $340,900 grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which the county of Saginaw won this March. The award was made under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) as part of an Energy Efficiency Community Block Grant Program, according to the event center. The demonstration project was approved to support urban redevelopment of Saginaw.

The 8-foot tall, 250-foot-long solar installation will have high visibility on the center’s south-facing wall adjacent to the entrance of Wendler Arena, said Terry Minor, an electrical engineer and vice president of William Kibbe & Associates, the architectural firm that’s designing the system.

“[The array will be] in a canopy-type arrangement on the wall,” he said. The modules will be mounted at a 45 degree incline to take advantage of Michigan’s sunlight.

“We’ve got an LCD screen on the inside [showing production]. We’ll have a link to the array on the web, so people can call it up on the web and look at it there too,” Miner said.

Given the visibility of the project and outreach efforts, the array could help more people in the area learn about solar and choose to install.

“We’re hoping so,” he said.

When completed and online, the array will be able to provide enough power to light about two-thirds of the arena during a hockey game, according to The Saginaw News.

In all, the array is expected to save the center $3,000 to $4,000 a year in electric costs. While significant compared to the average home’s annual energy bill, it is a far cry from the $25,000 per month spent on electricity at the events center, according to the newspaper.

Construction on the project, being undertaken by J. Ranck Electric, is set to begin in early September.

“We’ll be starting it probably next week,” Minor said. “We just finalized the structural drawing. They’re fabricating steel supports right now.”

The turnaround time for the project is short at about two weeks.

“We’re shooting for a Sept. 15 startup date,” Minor said.

After that, the local utility will have to inspect and approve the project. It could be online within a month of starting construction.

“They say it takes maybe two weeks to get up and online,” he said.

Image courtesy of Dow Event Center.