CORE’s Pioneer Solar Begins Production

In February, Sedalia-based CORE Electric Cooperative (formally Intermountain Rural Electric Association) announced that its new utility-scale Pioneer Solar facility began production in December 2020.

The facility, which sits on 540 acres east of Denver in Bennett, generates 80 megawatts of power that will be utilized on CORE’s system for at least the next 10 years. Pioneer Solar has more than 230,000 single-axis tracking photovoltaic panels that follow the sun’s path to increase exposure.

This is the cooperative’s second utility-scale solar facility, and more renewable projects are slated to come online by the end of 2021. The co-op will have nearly 200 megawatts of renewable energy capacity on its system by 2025.