Recently, news spread that one of the world’s largest solar canopies will be built at Hangzhou Bay in China. This solar canopy is planned to have an installed capacity of 55 MW upon completion, and 20,000 parking lot spaces (the size of 20 soccer fields) to shelter Volkswagen’s production and employee cars. The project will use Risen Energy solar panels and Solis string inverters by Ginlong (Ningbo) Technologies.
This solar canopy project is not the first of this kind for Volkswagen. In October 2014, its Nanjing plant invested more than $18 million (120 million yuan) to complete a distributed generation solar canopy with an installed capacity of 13 MW, which has been interconnected to the grid and had been generating power for more than a year. The large ground-mount solar canopies rolled out by Shanghai Volkswagen aligne with its corporate strategic objective for sustainability.
The Volkswagen solar canopy is an example of a trend where large ground-mount utility-scale solar farms are not using central inverters. With the ripening of the string inverter technologies, the market gradually acknowledges and accepts the advantages of string solutions, such as system design flexibility, minimum power loss during equipment failures, low life-time maintenance cost and the string level MPPT optimization.
Ginlong Solis 36kW string inverter, with its unique 4 (Four) MPPT maximum power point tracking technology, high performance and reliability, will ensure the long-term reliable operation of this solar canopy project.
