As I emptied my pocket book and mind of every little thing I attempted to soak up at RE+ 2022 in Anaheim final week, one of many greater themes that emerged is the renewed deal with the business and industrial (C&I) PV area. Right here’s only a style of all the brand new merchandise and integrations introduced on the present.
MLPE re-tooling for C&I rooftops
Microinverter producer APsystems is making one other push into the C&I area with the QT2 sequence. This four-module, three-phase microinverter product presents increased energy output than the earlier era product — 1,800W (480V) and 1,728W (208V) within the U.S. (99.5% MPPT effectivity) – which is a should as module energy retains on rising. In actual fact, the QT2 is good to be used with 4 high-capacity business PV modules from 450W to 600W+, enabled with Reactive Energy Management (RPC) and UL 1741 SA (CA Rule 21).
“The QT2 sequence represents a big breakthrough in photo voltaic panel present and energy, energy density, conversion functionality,” stated APsystems CTO Yuhao Luo. “This highly effective functionality mixed with clever firmware, built-in fast shutdown compliance, and quick set up makes this a very distinctive product within the market.”
The truth that microinverters are low voltage and inherently compliant with NEC 690.12 Speedy Shutdown necessities additionally makes this compelling. The corporate additionally notes 20% fewer elements for elevated reliability and improved enclosure design and topology for higher cooling at excessive temperatures versus the earlier era.
Yotta Energy can be offered on the APsystems QT2, which is the built-in provider for the brand new Yotta DPI-208 and DPI-480. These Twin Energy Inverters can combine straight with Yotta’s module-level SolarLEAF Vitality Storage Expertise. However even perhaps greater information out of Yotta is a line of economic EV chargers, together with a solar-powered EV Charging Station that may be deployed in lower than 48 hours and ship as much as 510 miles of solar-powered charging every day and is grid elective. All three merchandise will likely be commercially accessible in Q1 2023.
Likewise, Tigo Energy is stepping up its efforts to fulfill the wants of C&I installers. The current debut of Tigo’s TS4-A-2F 25A and corresponding fast shutdown system will work for photo voltaic modules rated as much as 700W (and a most enter voltage of 80V per module), together with bifacial modules. Each merchandise characteristic compatibility with Pure Sign know-how in Tigo RSS Transmitters and pair with an industry-leading checklist of third-party photo voltaic inverters.
SolarEdge Technologies launched the S-Collection, a brand new vary of good energy optimizers for C&I PV functions throughout North America that provides in SolarEdge Sense Join know-how. This detects temperature enhance on the connector stage to stop potential electrical arcs by shutting down energy move earlier than an arc can happen. The S-Collection Energy Optimizer can be designed for increased energy modules and bifacial modules, which as a result of rear-side module mismatch can endure from even better potential energy loss.
Oh hey, keep in mind tenKsolar? It was a Minn.-based module firm that wired its cells and modules in parallel to get rid of module-to-module mismatch, shading points, and so on., whereas including layers of redundancy and permitting for low voltage designs with excessive energy density. The corporate bumped into points with the microinverter it sourced and a big-time investor that had the mistaken imaginative and prescient for the corporate and know-how.
Effectively, Greg Cox of Alabama-based International RAIS is able to revive the idea. Cox was as soon as a tenK buyer who believed within the know-how and didn’t wish to see it go to waste. He has lined up buyers with a greater imaginative and prescient for what this know-how can do, and he thinks he has kicked the reliability points tenK 1.0 initially bumped into by teaming with NEP. Hold watch on the location for extra on this.
Bifacial alternative approaches
As reported final week, LONGi will start producing a smaller scale model of its 72-cell, utility-scale Hello-MO 5 module for residential and business functions within the U.S. market. The brand new 54-cell model (weighing in at underneath 50 lbs) is predicated on the M10 182-mm-monocrystaline wafer and will likely be accessible in early 2023, first as a monofacial module after which as a bifacial module – the latter being a much bigger deal than I initially thought.
Aaron Thurlow, head of distributed era for LONGi North America indicated to us, bifacial modules simply is likely to be the longer term in each C&I and residential segments sooner or later.
For one factor, value is changing into much less of an element between monofacial and bi (which can solely proceed). Second, the additional glass of the bifacial modules makes them bodily extra dependable (as evidenced by LONGi’s 30-year bifacial guarantee). At that time, the additional oomph from bottom seize is only a good bonus. We’ll be exploring this subject extra down the street, however the principle factor to know now could be that M10 wafer measurement and LONGi’s R&D is making this potential bifacial push doable.
Streamlined designs and quoting
The newest slick development right here is financiers integrating straight inside design platforms. For instance, Aurora Solar introduced key integrations at RE+. Dividend, Mosaic, and Sungage Monetary can now present photo voltaic installers and their home-owner clients with easy, accessible funding to go photo voltaic.
On the C&I vitality storage aspect although, Energy Toolbase added one other financier, Luminia, that may provide PPAs and Property Assessed Clear Vitality (PACE) mortgage financing for business photo voltaic, vitality storage, and vitality effectivity tasks proper from the platform. Luminia connects C&I property house owners with a broad vary of financing options by way of its proprietary know-how platform to allow the deployment of photo voltaic, vitality storage, EV charging stations, and different vitality effectivity upgrades with none upfront fee.
Scaling up a bit extra to microgrids, Xendee launched a brand new multi-node characteristic that allows customers to create interconnected microgrid networks from a constellation of smaller DERs that may assist as much as 25 know-how varieties.
“Xendee’s new multi-node characteristic provides engineers the instruments to design giant scale or interconnected microgrids utilizing the identical instruments as a standard undertaking,” says Michael Stadler, CTO, and co-founder of Xendee. “We’re transferring previous easy vitality and financial modeling to permit the design of whole networks of microgrids. These networks can take into account cable size, transformer necessities, energy move, and the losses on account of distribution between the nodes.”
Xendee has greater plans to attach these simplified designs with a microgrid controller as effectively, so that every one of that planning higher interprets to leads to the sector.
Mounting and racking made simpler
Austrian PV racking professional AEROCOMPACT launched a rail-based mounting system – CompactFLAT SN 2 – for all widespread module sizes, together with large-area photo voltaic modules as much as 2.384 m x 1.303 m. The system is an optimized model of its predecessor, CompactFLAT SN, and is equally appropriate for mounting framed PV modules on concrete, bitumen, foil and gravel roofs. AEROCOMPACT designed it for photo voltaic installations going through south or east/west with a tilt angle of 10°. The system’s rail cross connectors may also be used as ballast helps. Since they are often constantly adjusted to the module size, pre-assembly is fast and simple even with out modules.
“Extra variants of the SN 2 will comply with on the finish of the yr in order that we will meet all buyer necessities with one system,” says AEROCOMPACT product supervisor Irene Zemanek.
For 15 years, PanelClaw has led the flat roof PV market. One purpose for that’s its in-house design and undertaking administration instrument. Effectively, at RE+, PanelClaw made that accessible for all to make use of.
The clawOS software program is a cloud-based structural design platform with the ability and class to deal with just about any undertaking utilizing the clawFR mounting system. It consists of particular person level hundreds, multi-azimuth layouts and multi-rooftop capabilities, AutoCAD and Helioscope integration, a local format engine, and a complicated wind and seismic engine. The cloud-based software program permits for anytime, wherever entry to development units and calculation packages, with the flexibility to evaluate format change impacts from the job web site.
FTC Solar confirmed off its new one module in portrait (1P) Photo voltaic Tracker Answer, the Pioneer, which can enormously increase the variety of jobs and websites they will deploy trackers within the DG area. Key to the Pioneer design is its hexagonal torque tube, which led to all kinds of good tweaks, reminiscent of requiring solely 11 piles per row and eradicating the necessity for via bolts to maintain modules in place. Its time trials present modules can transfer from a pallet to hanged glass in 40 seconds.
We additionally caught wind of a Solar FlexRack ballasted tracker designed only for landfill photo voltaic tasks.
There’s far more from RE+ to extract from my mind within the coming days. Keep tuned.
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