On May 14th, 2012, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has developed a new repeatable test protocol that simulates real shade conditions and can predict with much greater precision the effects of shade on a solar array.


12% improvement in system performance

The new test, Photovoltaic (PV) Shading Testbed for Module-level Power Electronics, demonstrated that under heavy shading conditions the use of micro-inverters instead of typical string inverters can help mitigate the impacts of shade by improving system performance by more than 12%.
 
The test was co-authored by NREL senior engineers Chris Deline and Jenya Meydbray, as well as Jason Forrest and Matt Donovan of PV Evolution Labs (Davis, California, U.S.). The research was paid for by DOE.

An initial application of the test protocol was conducted by PV Evolution Labs, showing the shaded performance benefit of micro-inverters compared with a typical string inverter on identical 8 kilowatt (kW) solar arrays.

The micro-inverter was found to increase system production by 3.7% under light shading, 7.8% under moderate shading, and 12.3% under heavy shading, relative to the reference string inverter case.
 
NREL is the DOE's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC.

The study is available for download at http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/54876.pdf

2012-05-17 | Courtesy: U.S. Department of Energy | solarserver.com © Heindl Server GmbH

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