Viabilidad técnico-económica para convertidores en MT para grandes instalaciones fotovoltaicas

Abstract

With the development of renewable energy industry during recent years, the capacity of photovoltaic (PV) generation systems is increasing dramatically; nowadays, it is not difficult to find facilities of tens of megawatts and several hectares of surface, which complicates the collection of the generated energy and, as well as, increases the losses.

Consequently, inverters should trend to reach the demands of high input voltage and wide input power ranges; then, the possibility of using MV grid-tied inverters is considered. Among the normalized voltages, a line voltage of 6 kV is considered since reaching higher voltages with limited input power up to 1MVA seems unaffordable with the semiconductor technologies available on the market at a reasonable cost. This paper analyzes the feasibility of the solution from both, technical and economic point of view. This change requires not only a change in inverter technology, but also an adaptation of the whole installation, the costs associated with replacing low voltage with medium voltage switchgear, including connections, protections, etc. will be analyzed.