A 30-megawatt solar development project in Indianapolis presents a Minneapolis solar company with significant growth opportunity.

Sunrise Energy Ventures, based in Minnesota, announced this week that it will develop three 10-megawatt solar arrays for Indianapolis Power & Light. Together, the three arrays will make up the largest solar project in the Midwest United States, according to a release from Sunrise.

The three solar installations will produce enough electricity to power 7,500 homes.

The award is great news for Sunrise, said Dean Leischow, the company’s managing director.

“We’ve spent the last two years working with IPL to get to this point,” he said. “It would be a significant deal for anybody.”

Being the largest project in the Midwest, the Indianapolis arrays are both high-profile and big step up in size from what Sunrise has done so far.

The company has experience developing large commercial solar systems with power purchase agreements, Leischow said. But this will be the biggest.

The company has installed 2.9 megawatts in New Mexico with Xcel Energy and is working on another 2.5 megawatts there. Sunrise has also installed 5.2 megawatts of solar in North Carolina under and agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

“We’re a relatively small developer,” Leischow dais. “But we’re looking forward to going upstream and doing more.”

He said Sunrise is working on finalizing vendor agreements and interconnections and he expects to begin construction in March. He said it will likely take a year from ground breaking to get the systems up and running.

The solar arrays are part of Indiana’s growing solar initiatives. The state has seen a surge in solar activity over the last year and a half. There is a major installation at the Indianapolis International Airport now and plenty of other large-scale projects in the works.

A lot of the solar industry growth is resulting from a feed-in-tariff program. Leischow said this project is part of the FIT.