Power-One has introduced its new AURORA ULTRA-1400 central inverter with an output power of up to 1.4MW. The central inverter is liquid-cooled and the largest product in the Power-One RE offering and has been designed for large commercial and utility-grade installations.
Problem
Maximizing yield from large commercial and utility-scale PV power plants requires improved uptime and energy harvesting through a reduction in downtime caused by the failure at the inverter level or the photovoltaic field. Eliminating plant shutdown and reducing fault repair times are required.
Solution
According to the company, the inverter has industry-leading power conversion efficiencies of up to 98.7% combined with an extra wide input voltage range and multiple MPPT channels, which optimize energy harvesting across a wide array of operating conditions. The main feature of the new system is represented by its IP65 enclosure with passive liquid cooling with total segregation of internal compartments that extends the maintenance cycle and reduces the cost of maintenance. The product is equipped with internal recombiner compartment with up to 24 individually fused inputs. Due to the circuit topology the output voltage is 690Vac which allows a significant reduction of AC losses and the possibility of direct coupling with LV/MV standard transformer used in the large wind industry.
Applications
Large commercial and utility-grade installations.
Platform
Since its modular structure is made of front accessible and extractible subassemblies, installation and maintenance procedures are rather easy. This large inverter system can be monitored via Ethernet communication and two independent RS-485 communication interfaces for inverter and intelligent string combiner monitoring. The new product is compliant to BDEW (German Federal Association for Energy and Water) and FERC 661 (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission).
Availability
June 2011 onwards.
