Enphase Energy micro-inverters convert solar DC power into grid-compliant AC power. They also make things safer and cheaper to use, as well as easier to monitor. What’s not to like, asks Brian Krause, owner of Woodstar Energy, a provider of construction services for home remodeling and renewable energy serving the Northwest Chicago suburbs.
An inverter is an electrical device that changes DC (direct current) power to AC (alternating current), or AC power to DC. Solar photovoltaic systems, or solar PV panels which convert sunlight to electricity, produce DC power. DC is also the same kind of power that gets produced off of a battery, whereas homes and businesses run off AC power.
Historically, with solar photovoltaic systems, you run panels together in a series circuit. That means running one panel after the other to produce high voltages, somewhere in the 640 volt range. And then at that point, you feed that into a single inverter, one which will change that into AC current. The downside would be when doing it this way is that you are working at high voltages.
It’s mainly a downside for safety reasons more than anything else, but also not that many people are trained to work as high voltages as with low voltages. In addition, when you are dealing with higher voltages, you tend to need to use a lower gauge wire, which is a thicker wire, which is going to be much more expensive. In addition, since the panels are run in a series, if one panel has less performance or is producing a lot less electricity than the rest, then all panels will be blocked to that production level.
An Enphase Energy Micro-inverter does the exact same thing as a regular inverter; it is tied into each panel. At this point, each panel is producing its own electricity and converting energy from DC to AC independently. By using the micro-inverter that also is working with lower voltages, we can use a larger gauge, which is a smaller wire – the larger the gauge, the thinner the wire. And the thinner the wire, the less it costs.
So using an Enphase Energy micro-inverter reduces the costs of wiring, for one thing. It is using 240 volts — which is a voltage that many more people are used to working with — and it’s a little bit safer. The biggest aspect of using this inverter, however, is that if one panel is not producing as much energy, it will not affect the other panels.
Lastly, you are able to also have monitoring packages that will then give you monitoring over the Internet on a pro-panel basis, so you can see exactly what each panel is producing. And you can know about a problem on a particular panel right away.
