“Our activities play a key role in EF Solare’s business: for the past two years, we have been working to ensure that our design solutions always meet the Group’s goals. Thanks to the revamping of the inverters, we are able to adapt the plants to the latest technological developments, ensuring the highest performance standards for an ever-increasing solar energy production.”
REVAMPING THE INVERTERS TO IMPROVE THE CONVERSION EFFICIENCY OF THE GROUP’S PLANTS
Being a leader in the photovoltaic sector, EF Solare is continuously challenged to be up to date with the latest technological solutions, deploying activities aimed at innovating its assets and operating processes.
In particular, the Group focuses on enhancing the plants in its portfolio through specific revamping activities that can improve efficiency and increase clean energy production.
In the past two years, in addition to the complete revamping activities (modules, inverters, structures), EF Solare has undertaken several revamping activities of modules or inverters only. Inverters are an essential component in a photovoltaic system, which converts the continuous electricity produced by solar radiation into alternating electrical current, allowing it to travel through the grid infrastructure to end consumers.
The decision to replace the inverters with new generation machines ensuring higher performance and better safety standards may result from different reasons: ageing/wear of the inverter, regulatory compliance, the need to reduce plant downtime, increasingly innovative and efficient equipment on the market, that can also provide information for maintenance activities.Furthermore, by replacing the most obsolete inverters, it is also possible to rationalize suppliers, in order to simplify the work of the Group’s teams. Indeed, choosing a smaller number of suppliers makes it possible to operate more efficiently by developing direct collaborations and standardizing the components used. This choice is part of the industrialization strategy of all the processes in the Operations area, implemented by EF Solare to guarantee increasingly high-performance management of the Group’s many plants.
The process of replacing inverters started by EF Solare has, therefore, the aim of preventing possible plant outages and equipping itself with the most innovative and high-performance instruments in terms of conversion capacity and internal self-diagnostic systems.
“The inverter replacement activity requires, however, a careful analysis of the plant under revamping, as each asset in the portfolio has different technical and structural characteristics depending on its location” explained Claudio Alori, Head of Performance & Monitoring at EF Solare. “In some cases, for example, revamping can be carried out by replacing the centralized inverter with multiple string inverters, capable of facilitating the monitoring and maintenance of individual sections of the plant, minimizing the impact of any failures and optimizing conversion capacity.”
Over the past two years, the Group has carried out scheduled inverter replacements on more than 40 plants for more than 100 MW of power.
“Our activities play a key role in EF Solare’s business: for the past two years, we have been working to ensure that our design solutions always meet the Group’s goals. Thanks to the revamping of the inverters, we are able to adapt the plants to the latest technological developments, ensuring the highest performance standards for an ever-increasing solar energy production. The industrialization process started by the Group requires us to work to optimize each of our activities, thus contributing to the growth of EF Solare and the entire photovoltaic sector,” commented Alessandro Caffarelli, Head of Engineering at EF Solare.