Huawei Technologies is launching its first smart inverter solution to the global residential solar photovoltaic (PV) market. The ‘FusionHome Smart Energy Solution’ is designed from the bottom-up to be a ‘one-4-all’ (one inverter SKU for all) residential application scenarios that offers a number of key capabilities for future residential home needs such as power optimization, energy storage and smart home integration in a simplified plug & play configuration.
Problem
With residential PV incentive policies such as Net Metering and Feed-in Tariffs under constant reductions and changes, ‘self consumption’ strategies need to evolve to provide, PV system performance optimization, intelligent energy storage and be smart home compatible and ‘future proofed’ for distributors, installers and residential consumers in a cost competitive way.
Solution
The Huawei FusionHome Smart Energy Solution offers the ability to balancing diverse PV residential customer needs, while providing focused technical & service support that enables PV distributors to significantly reduce the procurement process of having to deal with multiple inverter & module brands, leading to complex inventory management control. PV installers require focused technical and service support that provides professional training and responsive & smooth warranty service. The Huawei FusionHome Smart Energy Solutions helps to simplify the often complex design of a residential PV roof system that is often limited by common constraints that to prohibit the ability to maximize rooftop kWh yields. Constraints such as all panels in a single string should be design to be in the same direction and that panels should not be deployed under shadow areas. Other restrictions include using only the same type of module in one string and that the length of parallel strings need to be identical. The system incorporates an inverter with leading performance (European weighted efficiency 98%) that also accommodates the use of PV optimizers on selected modules that may have shading or different roof orientation. The optional use of PV optimizers were needed with the inverter system limits the need for investment in optimizers, while maximising system yield, enabling greater ROI. The inverter comes with an integrated simple plug & play battery interface as standard, eliminating the need for inverter retrofitting and an additional AC/DC conversion module when the PV system is upgraded with self consumption energy storage. The system comes with the capability to provide fully digitalized & connected smart home service with smart PV ‘Cloud’ based home energy management center. This is expected to lead to Bit Manage Watt (BMW) for future ‘Zero’ energy home capability.
Applications
All residential rooftop applications and is energy storage and smart home ready.
Platform
The Huawei FusionHome Smart Energy Solution inverter uses advanced multi-level topology with less copper use and more silicon semiconductors, reducing inductor & cooling sink size significantly. Supports plug & play quick wiring without opening the inverter chamber and uses one-click start-up configuration and conducts system start-up health check, providing a seamless & smoother user experience leading to improving start-up efficiency, according to the company. The support one-click remote ‘o-Touch’ upgrade software is designed to reduce O&M costs with site visits eliminated that were previously required. System analyses I-V curves for all PV modules automatically and generates diagnosis report
Availability
The FusionHome Smart Energy Solution is being launched in Q3-2017, to China, Europe and Australia. The product is expected to be launched in the US market in the fourth quarter of 2017.