When it comes to the future of the solar power industry, some trends have built up enough momentum to be pretty close to inevitable — including the continuing importance of operational cost reductions, the escalating need for storage, and the ongoing development of microgrids, to name just a few.
These and other important trends in the solar industry are on the radar of the China-based string inverter manufacturer Huawei.
The quest to push costs down
Already, it’s possible to see the vital role string inverters are playing in boosting solar’s continuing growth — particularly when it comes to driving down costs so that solar can compete with and ultimately replace fossil fuel generation.
“The future trend of the solar plant will be a higher level of reliability and lower operational costs,” said James (Yuyu) Qiao, vice president of operations and product solutions for Huawei Smart PV Solutions North America.
String inverters help with both.
Lower operating costs are directly related to improved reliability, which Qiao notes is a function of both string inverters’ higher reliability design and the evolution toward a distributed solar plant architecture.
Having a multitude of string inverters instead of a few central inverters means solar plant operators are not as susceptible to failure-related downtime. Indeed, if a string inverter at a solar plant stops working, it has only a small impact on generation because only a very limited number of panels are affected.
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