Advanced Solar Products (ASP) of Flemington, New Jersey, has announced construction of a solar array to provide electrical power for the Bausch + Lomb facility in Rochester, New York, which will manufacture an entirely new line of contact lens.

The array will be constructed using 3,667 solar panels and will reduce the facility’s carbon footprint by approximately 800 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, the equivalent of taking about 100 gasoline-powered cars off the road.

Advanced Solar Products, one of the top solar contractors in the United States, partnered with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority ( NYSERDA), which provided support for this solar project through Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s $1 billion NY-Sun initiative. NY-Sun is advancing the scale-up of solar and moving the State closer to a sustainable, self-sufficient solar industry.

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Bausch + Lomb, the company that invented the contact lens, is expanding their Rochester facility to produce its new ULTRA® silicone hydrogel contact lens using an innovative manufacturing process. The electricity produced by the solar array will significantly offset manufacturing costs at the facility. “Our Rochester facility will help keep more than 1,000 good-paying, high-skilled jobs here in Rochester and not overseas,” says J. Michael Pearson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Inc., the parent company of Bausch + Lomb.

The manufacturing facility with related office and parking, occupies approximately 56 acres. The 1,100 kW ground-mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) system, located on approximately 3.6 acres at the northeast corner of the site, will produce 1,385,000 kWh of electricity per year, enough to power about 175 homes. Individual panels, each approximately six feet by three feet, are mounted at a 25-degree angle in portrait format to a maximum height of nine feet. With an AC combiner panel and transformer mounted on a concrete pad, the 33 string inverters will convert DC to AC electricity.