Idea that made an ordinary engineer a millionaire.
American entrepreneur Ron Corio has made a multibillion-dollar business in the production of trackers for solar panels.
Trackers – the mechanisms that move the panel towards the sun throughout the day, turned out to be a real gold mine. For decades, improving the devices that were once interesting to people, Ron Corio, provided his company with a capitalization of $4.6b.
Early in 1985 company named Wattsun Corporation, which developed low-cost solar “flat plates” needed a solution to place it in different angles. Ron Corio was the man for the job that started developing multi-tilt angle and eventually purchase shares of Wattsun in 1989, forming Array Technologies, Inc. as the world’s first solar tracking manufacturer in 1992.
The trackers were installed worldwide, but due to the market occupied by coal and other resources with huge deposits, the sun did not cause much demand. However, after the 2000s solar energy began to become a reality and Array started to grow significantly, winning tenders and constantly maximizing land occupancy.
Array’s main product is the DuraTrack system, which rotates photovoltaic panels on a single north-south axis throughout the day to follow the sun. Large-scale solar energy projects are usually arranged in consecutive ” rows “that form an”array”. The array can have dozens of rows with more than 100 solar panels in each row.
At the moment, Array Technologies is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of ground-mounted systems used in the solar energy business. Trackers increase the initial cost of a solar project but allow the panels to generate more energy compared to a fixed-tilt mounting system. Over the life of the project, this results in significantly lower level energy costs.
Sources:
https://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/news/2020/10/15/array-technologies-closes-