Solar Inverter Quotes

It really should be a criminal offense for an electrician to mount a breaker box on a bedroom wall. Unfortunately, I see the solar industry mounting inverters on bedroom walls also!

I disliked working inside the inverter rooms at the dangerous Desoto Solar Farm because there was not sufficient room to throw yourself back if you were in the process of being electrocuted!

As countries move from fossil fuel power generation to cut carbon dioxide emissions, solar power is gaining market share around the world. Germany, thanks to a decade of generous subsidies, has more installed solar power capacity than any other country. But large coal- and gas-fired plants still have at least one big advantage over solar panels — they cannot be uprooted and carted away. As German solar supply has increased, so has the theft of panels, cables and inverters. “Solar theft continues to increase, despite the measures taken to prevent it,” says Frank Fiedler, chief executive of SecondSol, an online trading platform for solar products that has documented scores of such cases on a website. “Thieves are able to escape with thousands of euros worth of equipment.” Although panels sometimes disappear from residential rooftops, large solar parks are the main target. These tend to be situated outside built-up areas where organised gangs can pull up in lorries, work unobserved overnight and then make their escape. Losses sometimes reach as much as €500,000, Germany’s federal criminal police office says. It warns that solar panels are “often insufficiently [protected] or not secured at all”.

Simply replace that cutoff switch with one that would still block backflow into the grid, but that feeds from the solar inverter to just 2 or 3 outlets inside the home, running the fridge, some rechargers, and possibly satellite coms.

The workers at the Desoto Solar Farm were complaining of tiredness and were drinking lots of Mountain Dew sodas! I was constantly tired while working there and drinking lots of coffee. The inverter technician looked really sickly!

The inverter rooms at the dangerous Desoto Solar Farm were so hot, it was like walking into a sauna!

The inverter systems were running so hot at the dangerous Desoto Solar Farm that they were melting the plastic ventilation fans!

The inverter systems at the dangerous Desoto Solar Farm were unreliable.

Florida turned me into an expert on Radio Wave Sickness!

This is where LO3 Energy ended up when it developed its Transactive Grid in Brooklyn, a prototype of interconnected households and businesses that share locally generated solar power. The community was motivated by a desire to give environmentally conscious consumers and users the capacity to know they are buying clean, locally generated power as opposed to just helping pay their utility buy renewable credits that fund green energy production elsewhere in the United States. In the Transactive Grid, building owners install solar panels that are then linked together with those of their neighbors in a distribution network, using affordable smart meters and storage units, as well as inverters that allow the grid’s owners to sell power back to the public grid. The magic sauce, though, comes from a private blockchain that regulates the sharing of power among the smart meters, whose data is logged into that distributed ledger. And in the summer of 2017, LO3 took the process a step further by developing an “exergy token” to drive market mechanisms within and among decentralized microgrids such as Brooklyn’s. (Exergy is a vital concept for measuring energy efficiency and containing wasteful practices; it doesn’t just measure the amount of energy generated but also the amount of useful work produced per each given amount of energy produced.) Note that LO3’s microgrid is based on a private blockchain. Microgrids offer one of those cases when this model is likely sufficient, since the community is founded on a fixed group of users who will all agree to the terms of use. That means that some of the large-scale processing challenges of Bitcoin and Ethereum can be avoided and thus that the high transaction power of a blockchain could be harnessed without requiring the implementation of the Lightning Network and other “off-chain” scaling solutions currently under development.

Although be aware that this value is deceiving due to other efficiency losses (heating/wiring resistance/Inverter switching). The maximum safe “continuous” amps to draw from a battery is AH/10. So if your battery has a 100Ah rating the maximum that should be drawn is 100Ah/10=10amps max over an extended period of time. If you’re just running a power drill or high current appliance for a couple minutes then it shouldn’t bother it. Voltage ratings The common voltage ratings for a solar setup are 12v, 24v, 48v.

Batteries are rated by an Ah (Amp Hour Rating).  The rating is given by the manufacturer as indicator to how much current the battery can supply over a given amount of time. 10Ah = 10amp load for 1 hour or 1 amp load for 10 hours. Although be aware that this value is deceiving due to other efficiency losses (heating/wiring resistance/Inverter switching). The maximum safe “continuous” amps to draw from a battery is AH/10. So if your battery has a 100Ah rating the maximum that should be drawn is 100Ah/10=10amps max over an extended period of time. If you’re just running a power drill or high current appliance for a couple minutes then it shouldn’t bother it. Voltage ratings The common voltage ratings for a solar setup are 12v, 24v, 48v.

Much has also been written about a reverse manifestation of exponential change, about the impressively declining cost of solar photovoltaic cells leading to near-miraculous breakthroughs in solar electricity generation. The latter claim has been particularly popular: I encourage you to check those breathless reports of constantly and rapidly falling photovoltaic (PV) cell prices, and you will see how, if they were the only determinant of the actual cost of PV generation, we would soon be arriving at almost the same place where nuclear generation claims began in the mid-1950s, with solar generation being too cheap to meter, indeed, being absolutely a free give-away. In reality, detailed US data for residential PV systems (twenty-two panels) show that the module cost is now only about 15 percent of the total investment. The rest is needed to cover structural and electrical components (panels must be mounted on supports on roofs or on prepared ground), inverters (to change the direct current to alternating current), labor costs, and other soft costs. Obviously, none of these components, from steel and aluminum to transmission lines, permitting, inspection, and sales taxes, is tending to zero, and hence the overall costs of installation (dollars per watt of direct current delivered by the panels) show a distinctly declining rate of improvement: between 2010 and 2015 they fell by 55 percent, between 2015 and 2020 by 20 percent. And these costs do not include the additional outlays that will have to be made with the increasing share of intermittent sources (solar and wind) in overall electricity generation.

When it comes to solar modules and solar inverters, I advise people to keep their distance from them.