
Excess solar production is routed to the batteries or curtailed if necessary
#DESIGN A DC MICRO GRIDS FOR RESIDENTIAL HOUSE GENERATOR#
Accepts grid, generator and ac solar input energy.Maintains operation of ac-coupled solar during a grid outage.Capable of supporting ac or dc solar connection.24 circuits of load control/ monitoring.The Energy Switch is a complex system that includes: Add to that the more well-known issues of matching the generation to the load profile, voltage control, congestion management and demand response needs, and Pecan Street thought that there was an opportunity for a very smart energy storage system. Houses have been measured changing from leading to lagging loads 70 times a day. More complicated yet is the fundamental displacement current in these devices is often leading. Individual set-top boxes, washing machines and high-efficiency lighting have been measured at a power factor under. Modern home loads do not show this behaviour: the switch-mode power supplies for CFL/LED lighting, variable speed drives, set-top boxes, phone chargers and computers rarely seem to be power factor-corrected well in an effort to keep costs low. 95-.97, the power factor has been mostly caused by current displacement and has been lagging because of the motors for HVAC systems and refrigerators. Historically when homes fall below a power factor of. Making matters more complicated for system planners, total power factor is comprised of two components, distortion and displacement. 95. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case structures without solar are commonly measured at total power factors of below. In many of the engineering texts for power distribution, the classical assumption is that a residential structure is a significantly high-quality load, typically a power factor of. The solar often replaces the real power load of the structure, leaving the utility to support the reactive power portion of the load.

One of those issues was the resultant power factor at the service entrance of a modern residential structure.

The results were not necessarily surprising, but they did point to issues that the previous generation of legacy inverters or the current generation of Rule 21-compliant smart inverters do not address. Several years ago, power quality monitoring equipment was installed in several homes with solar PV in Pecan Street’s Austin testbed. The program was a fast-paced, one-year development that included a two-month demonstration and ended with NREL doing a third-party validation of performance. As part of DOE-FOA-0001225, a DOE-funded program in conjunction with Concurrent Design, Pecan Street developed a residential microgrid called The Energy Switch.
