“What else is essential to a photovoltaic plant, apart from the rate of generation and the high yield?”

“Clear!”

From large-scale ground power plants to today's distributed small-scale power plants, PV is getting closer and closer to people's lives. The 17-year-old distributed PV explosion also marks the official development of PV into a viable life-style products.

The efficiency and profitability of power plants is a concern for every photovoltaic owner/investor, but there is also a fundamental but easily overlooked concern: safety.

Unlike large-scale land-based power plants, distributed photovoltaic power generation relies on residential buildings, industrial plants, warehouses, commercial buildings, schools, and municipal buildings, and these building carriers are generally densely populated, equipped with relevant precision instruments and equipment, or stored with flammable substances, so the requirements for safety performance of distributed photovoltaic power generation are more stringent, it is necessary to ensure that photovoltaic power generation does not affect the original production and living functions of these buildings, and does not cause safety hazards to personnel, production and materials.

In the area of security, let us first look at national regulations:

·In the United States, the Fire Safety Association revised its National Electrical Code: “In the event of an emergency, the DC voltage of a photovoltaic system should not exceed 80 volts when the AC connection of the photovoltaic system is disconnected.”.

·In Italy, firefighters are not allowed to extinguish a fire in a building with a voltage.

·Germany, the first to implement the VDE fire safety standards, clearly in photovoltaic systems between the inverter and the need to add a DC power cut-off device.

·In Australia, according to Ove R11-1:2013, there must be a circuit breaker near the assembly.

It is clear that the primary consideration for the safety of photovoltaic plants worldwide is the high-voltage direct current (HVDC) in the system. High-voltage DC will not only affect the rescue work, but also is one of the main causes of fire (high-voltage DC arcing) . Therefore, in foreign countries, the dc-side voltage is generally only about 40V micro-inverter has become the bread and butter.

The safety of micro-inverter is not only reflected in the 40V low voltage. As we all know, the operation life cycle of photovoltaic power plant is defined as 25 years, to ensure 25 years of stable power generation, plant quality, safety, operation and maintenance are indispensable. The micro-inverter has component-level monitoring, which can observe the running status of each component in real time during the 25-year operation cycle. If there is a security fault, it will be the first time to get feedback from the big data monitoring platform, the security of the whole system is improved while the efficiency of power generation is ensured.