Pika Energy’s transformerless, grid-forming solar inverters are now listed to the UL-1741 standard and are shipping to customers throughout North America. The UL-listed Pika Islanding Inverter (model X7601) is the most recent of the Maine-based manufacturer’s inverters to receive the ETL mark for UL-1741 compliance. The company’s X3001 inverter line has been UL-listed since 2013.
Pika also recently was awarded funding from the government through the Department of Energy’s Sunshot Initiative to further build out their technology and add features to the system for grid service applications including demand response.
The Pika Islanding Inverter is the core component of the Pika Energy Island, a single-inverter system for solar-plus-storage applications using smart batteries. The Pika Energy Island system also includes the Pika PV Link DC solar substring optimizers. Its grid-optional performance makes it perfect for grid-tied applications in which a smart battery will be added at a later time.
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“The UL-1741 listing for the Pika Islanding Inverter represents a significant step forward in the solar inverter industry, as there is now a third-party-certified, fully islanding, transformerless, single-inverter option that provides unrivaled simplicity for residential solar-plus-storage,” said Pika Energy President and Co-Founder Ben Polito. “When coupled with a smart battery, the Pika Islanding Inverter enables solar-plus-storage with round-trip efficiency north of 90%. This is a dramatic improvement on the 80th-percentile round-trip efficiencies typical of conventional 48V solar-plus-storage approaches,” Polito said.
The Pika Islanding Inverter uses the company’s patented, bi-directional REbus 380VDC plug-and-play nanogrid, which uses embedded smart controls and data on the same wires as power transmission. This makes the Pika Energy Island system, which requires no autotransformer, easy and quick to install, and extremely efficient. This new, higher level of efficiency is critical to solar-plus-storage customers who use batteries for daily cycling to manage energy costs.
“The Pika Energy Island’s high round-trip efficiency is a huge win for applications like energy arbitrage and utility aggregation, both of which reap substantial dividends on the performance of solar-plus-storage with efficiency that is over 12% higher than the state of the art,” said Polito.
— Solar Builder magazine
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