California-based Fresco Solar has completed two rooftop photovoltaic installations using components approved for 1,000 V (DC): a 440 kW array on an industrial building in Hayward, Calif., and a 102 kW array on the roof of an office building in San Jose, Calif.
The Hayward solar array has over 1,400 ReneSola 300 W panels on the roof and 15 ABB Power One Trio inverters. It uses over 15,000 feet of 1,000 V PV wire.
‘This is half of what we would have needed at 600 V – and half the complexity,’ says Mark Jacobi, vice president of operations for Fresco Solar.
Fresco Solar says the availability of small, three-phase 1,000 V (480 V AC) inverters that meet U.S. rules for grid interconnection was the key to the distributed inverter architecture used in both installations.
‘This move saves us a lot of labor, wire, connectors and combiners,’ says Sean Kenny, CEO of Fresco Solar. ‘We have already redesigned two projects on the books and are bidding all of our projects based on this new reality.’
