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Product Briefing Outline: Satcon Technology Corporation has introduced the ‘Satcon Solstice’, a utility grade DC architecture solution for highly efficient power conversion for large scale solar power plants. It delivers fine grained power harvesting and control with critical utility ready grid interconnection, and will boost total power production by 5-12 percent over designs using standard inverters.

Problem: As solar installations have continued to increase in scale, so have the complexities of harvesting and managing power. The industry has reached an inflection point. In order for large-scale installations to achieve a sustainable and profitable levelized cost of energy, a fundamental shift in array design parameters and energy management is required. By changing the paradigm of how energy is managed—making it smart enough to monitor and control the entire PV system, agile enough to optimize constantly changing variables, and flexible enough to take advantage of new, more affordable technologies throughout its lifespan

Solution: Building on Satcon’s solar PV inverter technologies, Solstice is claimed to be the next generation of solar PV energy harvesting. Coupling string level power conversion with a new smaller footprint central inverter design, Solstice is a complete power solution that will provide high efficiency, localized command and control, and higher kilowatt hours per day. By converting power at each individual string, the solution virtually eliminates typical array losses from shading, soiling and panel mismatching. By conditioning power, monitoring performance, and controlling variables at the string level, Solstice keeps even the largest PV plants running smoothly and enables them to achieve maximum throughput. The result is a lower levelized cost of energy and higher return on investment throughout the entire lifespan of an array.

Applications: Large-scale solar power plants.

Platform: 30kW, 60kW, 100kW, 150kW, 200kW, 250kW, 500kW, and 1 MW DC-to-AC Converter. Integrated Transformer (internal or external; model dependent) System-Wide Command and Control Center.

Availability: Now entering its customer beta cycle, Satcon Solstice will be generally available in 4Q09.