From pv journal USA
Hail may cause important injury to photo voltaic installations and account for half of insured mission losses, in response to threat knowledgeable VDE Americas. While hail is unavoidable, injury will be prevented by tilting the photo voltaic modules on a tracker, referred to as stowing, transferring the modules away from the hail.
FTC Solar, a Texas-based photo voltaic tracker specialist, introduces the Automated Hail Stow Solution. It makes use of meteorological knowledge to routinely stow the photo voltaic modules if an ice storm is on the horizon.
After collaborating with VDE Americas to check the affect of hail occasions on photo voltaic installations, FTC Solar developed a hail stow technique that positions photo voltaic modules to attenuate the affect from direct hail and wind. .
The automated hail stow answer integrates with FTC Solar’s Sunops, a cloud-based PV asset monitoring answer designed to handle and enhance photo voltaic asset efficiency. The FTC experiences that the software program takes into consideration elements equivalent to superior monitoring algorithms and acceptable tracker storage for excessive climate occasions.
Ken Kozizki, chief advertising officer of FTC Solar, stated pv journal USA that the tracker can simply function on >50 diploma ice with modules dealing with the wind in response to meteorological predictive knowledge. The hail-stow algorithm is pushed by meteorological knowledge obtained by the FTC from an industry-leading third social gathering supplier, and climate circumstances are analyzed utilizing a number of radars that mix to kind an correct forecast for a location. .
There’s additionally a characteristic that enables the plant supervisor to manually transfer to the closest high-angle stow to cut back stow time, Kozizki stated. Stow thresholds can be adjusted, primarily based on threat urge for food and web site location, together with elements equivalent to ice dimension, chance and radius.
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