RIO RANCHO — Intel Corp. has unveiled its first solar electric installation in the state, hoping the array will demonstrate its potential to power such things as data centers that use huge amounts of energy.

The 10-kilowatt array in a parking lot north of the Intel manufacturing plant produces the equivalent of what four average-size homes use, said project manager Tom Soloman. The AC electrical power from the array will be fed into the power grid.

The system features 64 Sharp solar panels atop a long, carport-like structure.

"You can actually park your vehicle under this array, and when we have electric cars in a few years, you'll be able to plug in your car and charge it directly from the sun," Soloman said.

Intel has about $200,000 invested in the system, he said.

Project officials want to gauge the potential of such arrays to power data collection centers where companies concentrate their computer servers critical to running their business. Intel has about 5,000 servers in six data centers at the Rio Rancho plant.

One experiment planned with the solar array is to see how it can augment power needs for data centers in the summer, said John Miner, IT engineering manager.

"In some marketplaces — and Albuquerque is one of them — the power company's peak in the summer is at air conditioning time, 3 p.m. ... It is when the power system is most fragile," he said.

He also said experiments will be done under the solar array with containerized data centers, in which computers are racked inside a tractor-trailer rig-size container. For example, a filmmaker might want to have a computer graphics system on site during a shoot, Miner said.

"Ten kilowatts is a small size relative to the compute we do in a very large data center, but it actually is quite large as to what a small business would do," he said.