The inverter manufacturer, which already had its system self-certified to guarantee self-consumption without injection into the grid, now adds this certification issued by an independent external laboratory, providing its customers with greater assurance regarding the functionality of its solution.
According to the proposed Royal Decree regulating the administrative, technical, and economic conditions for self-consumption, presented by the Ministry for Ecological Transition, two types of self-consumption installations are recognized: with surplus energy and without surplus energy. This second type of system would remain attractive for installations that do not wish to register as energy generators. This would apply to all potential self-consumers with a direct medium-voltage electricity supply, for whom becoming generators would be prohibitively expensive, since Royal Decree 1699/2011 requires the inclusion of specific zero-sequence overvoltage protection in the installation's protection and metering system for this type of system.
The certification contains technical data for the power generators (photovoltaic inverters), power analyzers, current transformers, and the EMS (Energy Management System) control element. As the standard specifies, the certificate obtained by Ingeteam encompasses the operation of all these elements together. The EMS controller, which is in constant communication with the power analyzer, knows at all times the amount of energy demanded by the installation. Thanks to this, the EMS can control the solar power generated by the photovoltaic inverter, ensuring that it always matches the installation's demand. This guarantees that there is no energy surplus.
The photovoltaic inverters that have been certified according to the aforementioned UNE standard are all the models belonging to the different families of string inverters (INGECON SUN 1Play and 3Play), which Ingeteam markets for photovoltaic installations at residential, commercial and industrial levels, the largest of which is 100 kW of nominal power.
