The Milwaukee Public Museum located in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin has gone green by making use of its south-facing facade to produce clean, renewable solar energy. As part of a large restoration project, the museum chose to improve the building’s performance by replacing the original marble facade with 234 solar panels. The new seven-story facade will generate an estimated 77,000kWh per year, the equivalent of 442 sixty-watt light bulbs operating eight hours per day, all year round. In addition to the savings, the array will serve as an educational experience for the thousands of guests that visit the museum each year.
The project, developed by Convergence Energy, a company dedicated to providing all-inclusive services in the solar sector, selected photovoltaic inverters manufactured by Ingeteam. The museum is the first building in the City of Milwaukee to have a Building Integrated PV (BIPV) solar wall. In fact, research indicates the array is one of the largest vertical PV walls in the U.S. The installation, with a rated power of 98kWdc (70kWac), is now in operation after being commissioned on the October 28th , 2014.
“The Milwaukee Public Museum was a challenging project, as it is the first vertical solar facade of this size in the country and presented several technical hurdles. Fortunately for us, Ingeteam did not add to the challenge. In fact they provided strong support and exceptional response to any of our requests or questions. This allowed us to take advantage of their strong product offering sourced locally in Milwaukee and made this project a success”, stated John Kivlin, President of Convergence Energy.
The PV Inverters
The inverters were shipped from Ingeteam’s Milwaukee facility, which supports the growing U.S. demand for high-quality solar inverters. The inverters are part of the INGECON® SUN family and designed for the North American market, in compliance with UL-1741 standard. The equipment supplied for the project included multiple Ingeteam PV inverters.
To date, Ingeteam has supplied 4GW in PV inverters and 26GW in wind converters to customers across the globe, strengthening its position as one of the world’s leading manufacturers of power electronic equipment.