The Solstice utility-scale PV inverter from Satcon focuses on improving total system performance, reducing overall balance of system costs, and increasing system controllability, safety, and uptime. Its manufacturer says the inverter is engineered from the ground up to provide granular control over every component in the array—from a single string, to the inverter, to power delivered to the grid.
With its central command and control center, the inverter reacts to changing conditions quickly providing a complete power-harvesting and management solution for utility-class power plants. Solstice breaks a large array into small strings of well matched modules and harvests the energy on the DC end in order to optimize the performance of the entire array. By introducing fine-grained energy production, including string level MPPT, it delivers higher energy yield, ensuring that the negative effects of shading, soiling, and aging mismatch are localized and minimized while also being identified and reported.
On the DC side, string-level instrumentation can be used to manage the array and trend its performance, providing visibility to poorly behaving elements of the array, including ground currents. This enables centralized management and maintenance of the array, and improves both day to day performance and safety.
Other features include:
-total system power production boost by 5 – 12%
-lower overall balance of system costs by 20 – 25%
-reduced installation time & expense
Satcon www.satcon.es
