Our own Tobin Booth and Matthew Seitzler PV Array Aggregation Strategies in the April/May issue of SolarPro Magazine.
Solar Professional: PV Array Aggregation Strategies
"Blue Oak Energy’s team was proactive and reliable in delivering the PV system for our manufacturing facility."
- Paul Higa, House Foods of America Corp.
Archive for the ‘Technical Details’ Category
Solar Energy Components UL Listed to 1000 Volts
Is 1500V the new 1000V?
In the second quarter of 2011, manufactures of inverters and combiners began receiving certifications for meeting the updated UL1741-2010 standard, bringing 1000V listed products to the US market. Previously, only utility and behind-the-fence projects were able to install 1000V systems by using European inverters.
In addition solar panels, fuses, and disconnects have been UL listed to 1000V with their respective UL standards. European installations have been operating with 1000V systems for years, so it’s great to see the U.S. attempting to catch up.
The drive for increases to the DC system voltage is to reduce costs of wire and other balance of system components. With a higher voltage and more modules connected in series, more power can be transmitted on a given wire size and fewer source circuits are needed. The result? More efficiency. (more…)
Solar Energy Data Centers for IBM
How IBM is being smart and could be smarter
A fabulous article on solar powered data centers has been blanketing the media recently. IBM intends to use the variable and intermittent solar energy produced on a rooftop solar photovoltaic system to provide Direct Current to power their data centers.
This is an application for solar energy which has been underutilized over the years, in my opinion. Given the huge and constant energy demand which data centers require and the variable-rate structures from utility companies, solar energy folds nicely into an energy diversification portfolio and generally makes a healthy investment for a data center or server farm. (more…)