Vendors Sue Company Building Florida's Largest Solar Farm, Claiming Unpaid Bills

BlueChip Energy, the Lake Mary company building what could become Florida's largest solar farm, has been hit with claims from vendors that say they haven't been paid for almost $500,000 worth of services and materials.

The claims filed in court against BlueChip and its manufacturing arm, Advanced Solar Photonics, have not interrupted work on the massive alternative-energy project in Sorrento, the first phase of which should be completed by year's end, company spokesman Lawrence Hefler said.

Hefler said at least one of the disputes was in the "process of being resolved," but he could not discuss details. One claim was filed by a company that supplied BlueChip with more than 700 solar panels in December 2010, and the other was filed by an Orlando engineering firm that conducted an environmental survey and other tests of the solar-farm site last spring.

The solar-panel supplier, Motech Americas, sued Advanced Solar Photonics last month to collect $466,000 for solar panels and related products, according to documents filed in circuit court in Seminole County by Rich Loudermilk, a Sarasota lawyer representing the Delaware-based supplier. BlueChip has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, in Orange County, a circuit judge last month decided that ECS-Florida, an engineering company in Orlando, was entitled to recover about $25,000 from BlueChip for consulting services it provided last March for the solar-farm site.

Despite the alleged debts, BlueChip recently announced that it was more than doubling the size of the Sorrento Solar Farm project in Lake County — from 200 acres to 500 acres — through a land-lease agreement with Eustis.

The expanded solar project would boast 400,000 photovoltaic panels and, when completed, would generate 100 megawatts of power — enough electricity to meet the annual power needs of 20,000 homes, Hefler said.

The 25-year pact with Eustis allows BlueChip to put about 250,000 solar panels on a field where the city had sprayed its treated wastewater. The field is adjacent to BlueChip's field, a former cow pasture on the west side of County Road 437.

For lending the field, Eustis will receive $150,000 a year in cash and solar power to run its water and wastewater plants, which are on the northwest corner of the site. Eustis pays about $36,000 a year for electricity to power the two plants, said Dianne Kramer, the city's director of development services.

BlueChip, which also has a smaller solar-panel field on the roof of its Rinehart Road headquarters, still hopes to receive a federal grant that was set aside in federal stimulus funds for owners of renewable-energy facilities. Hefler said the company is awaiting word on its application, submitted in December.

"We're pretty confident," he said, noting that the company has met benchmarks for the grant.

Hefler said he does not expect the pending claims of unpaid bills to affect the application for the grant, which BlueChip representatives previously said could be worth as much as $45 million.