Talk:Grid-tie inverter

Inverter cost
Someday, someone is going to have to solve the problem of how expensive grid tie inverters are. It basically eliminates all alternative energy options as cost prohibitive. There were not many options last I checked (back in 1999). Jeff Carr 00:44, 13 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I checked again, still not that many it seems. Here is a page with a few. It's still about $1000 USD per kW. Jeff Carr 00:50, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm from Xantrex. I disagree that current inverter prices "eliminates all alternative energy options as cost prohibitive". Inverters are only about 7% of a grid tie solar system price. Also, the inverter industry has dropped prices...significantly. Just three years ago in the US, inverters under 3 kW were selling for over $.70 US/watt at wholesale. We are now under $.46/watt. And...we are including features to make installation less costly. Eg. many of us are now including a UL listed DC disconnect with the inverter which saves about $100 per inverter and lowers installation labor cost. Also, significant efficiency improvements have been made, increasing solar system productivity. In summary, the inverter industry is doing a lot to lower costs and increase performance. If you want to make solar stand on its own without incentives...you need to look at lowering the wholesale price of solar modules below $2 /watt (currently prices are closer to $4 /watt). If that happens we can all celebrate. [ Lloyd G ]

Suspicious of Typical Operation
I'm suspicious of the "Typical Operation" section of the article. First, the "12 or 24 volt" may apply to a single solar panel, but the voltage coming into an inverter from a string (or multiple strings in parallel via a combiner box) is going to be in the hundreds of volts. Second, I really can't believe that the inverter just chops the DC at 60 Hz and then filters out the harmonics. I find it much more likely that the inverter uses pulse-width modulation to synthesize a 60 Hz sine wave and that filtering is only used to remove the PWM switching frequency, which will be in the tens or hundreds of killohertz.--GrahamDavies (talk) 17:33, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Removed merge tag
Not all grid tie inverters use solar panels, and not all solar panel inverter installations are connected to a grid. These two articles need not be merged. --Wtshymanski (talk) 13:03, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Links from green energy pages
It took a long time to find this article when I was looking up how electricity is fed into the grid from wind, solar and other domestic or small industrial systems. It was only when a friend told me the name of the device that I was able to proceed, so I think it would be a good idea to provide links to this page from the pages on those other devices. LRRooster (talk) 21:29, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Copied by libra-energy.eu
This article has been copied in part by libra-energy.eu. See Mirrors_and_forks/Jkl for details. twilsonb (talk) 08:17, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Solar tracker has also been copied. A significant contributor may wish to start the Mirrors_and_forks. See Mirrors_and_forks/Jkl for details and progress reports. twilsonb (talk) 08:19, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Strings?
"Peak Power Tracking Voltage: This is also a very important value. This represents the DC voltage range in which the inverters' maximum point power tracker will operate. The system designer must configure the strings optimally so that during the majority of the year, the voltage of the strings will be within this range. This can be a difficult task since voltage will fluctuate with changes in temperature." What strings? I'm reminded of one of Colin Kapp's unorthodox engineers stories, but I think this is not related tot hat, and it is unclear what variety of string this ties up with. Midgley (talk) 10:06, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Bad explanation of the "Typical operation"
The beginning of the "typical operation" actually reads:

1- "The inverter has an on-board computer which will sense the current AC grid waveform, and output a voltage to correspond with the grid."

It's the opposite. It senses the AC VOLTAGE and outputs a CURRENT to correspond. The voltage is full-on/full-off as it is PWM, filtered typically by a pi lowpass filter.

2- "A high-quality modern GTI has a fixed unity power factor, which means its output voltage and current are perfectly lined up, and its phase angle is within 1 degree of the AC power grid."

Maybe they do for now, but fixed 100% power factor is a bad idea. Who's gonna supply the vars needed by motors and transmission lines? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.59.161.59 (talk) 02:44, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

Merge of Synchronous inverter

 * Support As the two articles currently stand, there's no distinction between them and Synchronous inverter is only a couple of sentences long anyway.
 * There may be future scope for a split. The article we have at present is on the currently highly interesting topic of small-scale inverters for domestic solar etc. No doubt there are bigger industrial-scale units too (although we don't seem to be covering them).  If we expanded coverage of the large plants, it would still be worthwhile keeping a distinct article on these domestic units. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:00, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Inappropriate title on external link.
One of the external links at the bottom of this article is titled something like "how the grid-tied inverter works". But when I went to that page, all it was was an advertising page from a supplier of these devices; there was no technical content on it. I would have deleted or renamed that link, but I'm timid, and thought someone more connected to the field might be able to make a more certain change. Thanks -- Geodejerry (talk) 02:18, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Merge to power inverter
There are several separate pages on power inverters and they mainly relate to sub-types of inverters that do not justify their own page and spam of links to PV related commercial websites are pervasive. Cantaloupe2 (talk) 23:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)


 * The grid-tie inverter is quite specific in what it does. Designed for selling to the grid and synchronizing the inverter to the grid's sine wave. I think a separate page is appropriate, especially with home level micro-grids becoming more and more pervasive. There is a page called grid-tied electrical system which should probably be merged with this page or this page be merged with that page. -- Jborrey (talk) 22:04, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Articles about inverters:
 * Solar inverter alias PV inverter
 * Solar micro-inverter aka microinverter
 * Power inverter aka inverter
 * Grid-tie inverter aka Synchronous inverter

Support for merger of Grid-tie inverter into Power inverter. I just realized that Power inverter doesn't even link to Solar inverter in its section "solar" (fixing it right now). When articles are merged, power inverter would need a well deserved a brush up. Currently the lead image shows an inverter underneath a PV-System... Rfassbind (talk) 04:50, 29 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Oppose  There are an awful lot of inverters around.  Grid-tie inverters are clearly distinct, well described and they have a special interest to our readers in that they're the one sort they (a significant proportion of) might have in their own houses (if they have solar PV panels).  A merge to synchronous inverter (as suggested above) would be a much better target - grid-tie inverters are distinct from the merely synchronous, but I can't think off-hand of many synchronous inverters that aren't grid-tied. I don't support merging to either, but especially not to the broadest inverter article. Andy Dingley (talk) 23:26, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Given the above, merge templates removed from Grid-tie inverter and Power inverter. Klbrain (talk) 22:45, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

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European references
Are there any references around to extend this to cover Europe any better? It's very US-only at present. Slava Ukraini fellas (talk) 08:24, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Batteries
No discussion here of the increasing demand for battery-backed systems, such as the Tesla Powerwall. In Europe electricity prices are rocketing and the feed-in tariff isn't following. So there's a lot of interest now in houses no longer feeding-in, but rather storing their daytime generation for savings at night, which needs batteries.

This also has implications for the ability to supply power with no mains supply, which was previously prohibited with a grid-tied inverter. Slava Ukraini fellas (talk) 08:28, 8 October 2022 (UTC)