With continuous advances in our technology nowadays, many people expects inverter technology to drive lower installation and maintenance cost on power distribution and usage among communities, residences and business establishments. Solar power, an abundant power source, is now ripe. As with our new technology, it happens fast depending on the economical stability.

INSTALLATION COST

Solar installation costs include three major components.
1. Solar module
2. Balance of system
3. Labor

Solar modules, having the higher cost on overall system, have lowered its market price significantly, at almost 50%. It is increasingly being commoditized and as its prices drop, balance of system and labor become a larger portion of the total cost of an installation. Therefore, the BOS (balance of system) and inverter segments have increased in its interest over the past few years.

Changes in inverter technology have been one of the reasons why inverters have received much more attention than before. This led to a large impact not only on inverter cost but also on BOS and labor cost. Inverter technology can now help other problems with regards to power sourcing and supplying to overcome and gain widespread acceptance in the marketplace.

NEW INVERTER TECHNOLOGIES

There have been a few, but notably changes and improvements on inverter technologies. It focused on two areas. These changes in the existing/central inverter are geared toward higher efficiency and larger capacity. It has also led to a bigger, more centralized inverters. This has been the incremental changes. The second inverter improvement focused towards decentralized architectures, including partial solutions as DC-to-DC optimization, which consist of add on electronics designed for augmentation of the central inverter and complete inverter solutions especially for micro inverters.@@@@SYSTEM COST@@@@Though inverter prices have not decreased significantly in the past few years, and with other components' prices falling, they still represent a greater portion of the total cost of a solar installation, even with its significant impact on both BOS and labor components.@@@@New inverter technologies today have the potential to reduce solar energy array operating cost. Based on distributed architecture, inverters allow delayed maintenance. In this type of highly redundant system, if one module or inverter fails, outage is limited to that module. The rest of the array will continue to operate normally. Most system owners and operators can have a plan of scheduled maintenance than emergency maintenance. Maintenance cost today are lower because some could be swapped out quickly and easily. This could be done even by less skilled staff. Unlike to large central inverters that need expert diagnosis, repair, removal and replacement.

ENERGY HARVEST

Inverter technology has always had a significant impact on energy harvest. The nature of module installation results to a any impact on module performance, that could affect the other modules in the string. And when you want to know its reliability, inverters have really reliable output. But when it comes to the point that it has problems already, it is such a headache. The biggest headache is sending a tech to a site repeatedly to fix a system failure, the return to install a replacement inverter. With micro inverters, they offer both improved unit reliability and system reliability. Unit reliability is largely improved due to the change in architecture of a distributed inverter system where each unit is only converting a small part on the power array.

SAFETY AND ENABLING OF INVERTER TECHNOLOGIES

Though we are talking about new inverter technologies nowadays, micro inverters are not actually a new technology, with other models actually emerging and gaining popularity during the 19th century. They were actually phased out because of their system problems. They are unable to to break through a percentage barrier of efficiency. But with new inverter technologies, micro inverters are now more efficient and comparable to other central inverters. The reliability rates far than the central inverters.

There are so many changes and development that still yet to come in the history of inverters. Different ideas and outcomes in the market start to grow, and with the continuous process of technological advancement, will inverter technology reach its limit? Or it will go beyond the unexpected?