ARDA Power says it will be incorporating Alencon’s DC-DC Optimizer – the SPOT – into its DC-coupled microgrid system which includes Solar + Storage. Here’s a look at how that’s going to work.
ARDA has pioneered the market for microgrids, offering a unique DC-connected microgrid solution which brings the benefits of a microgrid – including resiliency and increased use of renewables – to commercial and industrial buildings without the requirement for complex custom engineering or costly interconnect applications.
In the ARDA system, the Alencon SPOT will serve to enable the DC-coupling of solar to the ARDA microgrid, will perform maximum power point tracking (MPPT) on the PV strings, and will curtail output based on commands from ARDA’s microgrid controls. The Alencon SPOT, which creates galvanic isolation between the PV and battery DC bus, will allow ARDA’s systems to be even easier to install and safer to operate. The Alencon SPOT is the only large scale, PV DC-DC optimizer on the market today that offers galvanic isolation between the PV array and a DC bus.
“The ability the Alencon SPOT offers ARDA to isolate a potentially troublesome PV string while the rest of the solar plus storage system continues to operate is a huge benefit. Galvanic isolation of solar from the rest of the system simplifies the fundamental protection approach on a system level. Since our system is battery centric, we always have a battery on the DC bus, meaning that the fault issues that arise from the PV, if not protected against, can be more severe when high battery currents are taken into account,” states Aleksey Toporkov, the President of ARDA Power. “Alencon’s SPOT protects against such eventualities, giving our users the assurance that their system will harness and store the most possible PV power while operating with both maximum up-time and highest degree of safety.”
Alencon Systems updates its large-scale solar DC-DC optimizer
— Solar Builder magazine
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