Most of the solar projects that I have the opportunity to review are residential. Ramon and Mayra from TVLSertec took me a commercial operation in the area north of downtown Cabo San Lucas – AVO Cabo. I have seen their trucks driving around Los Cabos. AVO Cabo is one of the main suppliers of fresh fruits and vegetables to restaurants around Los Cabos. As they need to keep everything cool while it is in their warehouse, the level of air conditioning employed is very high. Cooling the main storage room can use 30 to 40 kW an hour with the air conditioning. This makes the installation of a solar system very cost effective for this type of business.

With panels over the whole roof of the warehouse, the system has three Victron Energy and one Fronius Inverter that convert the solar energy into electricity. The Victron Energy charge controllers are set up between the inverters and the battery management cabinets, each containing six Pylontech US5000 lithium-ion batteries. Each battery stores 4.8 kW of electricity. The total storage capacity in the 12 batteries is 57.6 kW. The system can be monitored on site, with the small screen that shows the current state of the whole system or online.

Walking into the fruit and vegetable storage room through a doorway with heavy plastic drapes, the room was very cool and stored a lot of the produce being distributed by AVO Cabo to its clients. As CFE charges commercial rates for this type of business, dramatically reducing the number of kW taken from grid provides a major savings to the business.