![]() ![]() ![]() Findings from Task 1- Define Requirements & Develop Architecture- showed that for large scale commercial & utility PV plants, locating the MPPT at the string level with a string size of >3kW is the most cost effective solution & that the increase in energy yield of 6% to 8% is more than enough to make up for the increased cost due to additional power electronics. Further, the project is concerned with choosing the right architecture for large scale commercial & utility scale plants but not residential installations. The program that GE Global Research proposed & received funding for is aimed at a type of distributed architectures, namely the dc architectures where only the MPPT function is distributed across the PV plant. While these architectures promise to increase the energy yield by 5% to 25% (depending where MPPT is located), & recovering losses due to shading, soiling, mismatch … there were no real studies and implementations in the field to corroborate these numbers. Several architectures were proposed ranging from a microinverter, microconverter, string inverter, string optimizer, and to a multi-string inverter or optimizer. ![]() This has led to thinking about alternative architectures where the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is performed much closer to the modules rather than at a central inverter. While effective at extracting as much power as they can, soon after there was a realization that in a PV installation where a central inverter is used, many losses occur, hence energy yield losses. Numerous maximum power point devices were developed to do just this. Since the early days of more » PV power, it has been recognized that the modules need to operate at their maximum power point in order to extract as much power as is available from the PV modules at a given time of day and year. While it took a long time for PV modules to mature into what we now see in the market and in rooftops across the world, the power electronics has been lagging behind & was always the weakest point in the PV plant, being responsible for the majority of failures & robbing the PV plants of their full potential by losing precious Watts in the process of converting power from DC to AC. Photovoltaic energy has come a long way from its early days when small cells were fabricated in the labs in the early 50s. ![]()
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