Ontario MicroFIT step by step

[Frank Shefman]

I have just finished my installation and received my contract for a 6.24 Kw system in Vaughan. I thought I would share my experiences from looking for insurance for it to trying to decide what inverter is right for my situation. Lots of links to useful resources. Hopefully it will help reduce the amount of time someone else has to spend to try to understand what is involved when installing a rooftop solar system on your residence in Ontario. The blog is a work in progress but is recent as of this post, so info is current. Enjoy.

http://solarinstall.blogspot.ca/

I would love to hear comments and of course corrections as I am a homeowner and not the expert!

[Mike Holm]

Thats great Frank. I have had my 4kw system installed since last November and to date generated about 4200kwh AC. Toronto Hydro has a $500 fee + supposedly a $1200 meter connection fee but we haven't seen that bill yet, although they might have taken it off from the the first cheques ( they are sent to my other half so sometimes I don't see them).

more power to ya.

[Dave Schwartz]

I've had my 4.1kW DC/3.9kW AC system installed since August 2010 now and its operation has been flawless. In the first year of operation, the kWh generated was about 5% over the Environment Canada estimate and this year, with little rain or cloud cover, the harvest has been about 12% over the estimate.

Even though our house is effectively electrically heated (geothermal), a 1kW pool pump runs 12 hours a day for 6 months of the year and there's a base load of about 600 watts due to internet equipment and various parasitic loads, we have not paid net for electricity since it went in. I usually pay a small bill in the depths of winter but the generation the rest of the year more than offsets in those months and cashing those cheques is nice. The only pain is keeping the snow cleared in the winter.

P.S. At about 11700 kWh generated now.

[Rob Beckers]

6.46kW of PV installed here (with a 6kW Power-One inverter), under the Ontario MicroFIT program, since November 2010. None of it faces south; about 2/3 faces south-west, 1/3 south-east (each almost exactly 45 degrees off south). To date it has produced 14,038 kWh (or $11,258 under the MicroFIT contract). That's slightly above expected production, in part because we have had an awesome solar year in 2012!

It's been working great! No maintenance, nothing has broken, it just works...

-RoB-

[Frank Shefman]

Rob- that's really quite interesting that you have a very similar setup to me except for the inverter. What type of panels are you using? The installer that put together my system recommended the Powerone Aurora 6 Kw inverter and I decided to go Solaredge for a few reasons including fire safety and potentially increased productivity because of where my panels are placed on the roof. Presently I do have one Optimizer that is not working, and that panel is dark and plan to have the Optimizer changed in the spring . The panel is facing west and the lose in revenue won't have much of an impact during the winter.

Other than that no problems.

I am trying, though to evaluate if the benefit of the Solaredge product (aside from the safety aspect) is real. Any ideas on how one can make this comparison?

[Rob Beckers]

Hi Frank,

The panels are 190W Suntech poly (as an aside, it hurts that nowadays I could get 260W panels in the same size, for 1/3 of the money). 22 modules facing south-west, 12 modules facing south-east, 33-degree pitch for both. The 6kW Power-One inverter uses one input for the 22, the other input for the 12, so both can do their thing independently. Due to trees and the low height of the 12 modules (garage roof, starting just 8 feet off the ground) there is quite a bit of shading much of the year during the morning as well. The higher 22 panels have shade during part of the day in spring-fall-winter in the evening, due to a Colorado blue spruce in front of the house. Works like a charm though!

What I'm trying to say is that it doesn't require optimizers or micro-inverters to handle shading gracefully (and with minimal loss of energy production). Most of the shading that most installations have to deal with is hard, well defined shade caused by relatively close objects. There's little an optimizer can do with those shaded cells, and if part of that panel is not shaded it will cause the bypass diode for the shaded section to kick in anyway, effectively removing those shaded cells. Where optimizers excel is in case of diffuse shade, where there's enough light left to make some energy, and where it affects the whole panel. That does not happen much in reality though (and there's little energy in that diffuse light, so it doesn't make much of an overall production difference).

We've installed optimizers (Tigos, I have no experience with SolarEdge), but don't like 'm from an installer's perspective exactly for the reason you point out: When something doesn't work we have to pull panels off the roof to replace the module, and we don't find out if it doesn't work until after everything has been installed.

Optimizers and micro-inverters have the great advantage of being able to monitor at the module level what is happening. If a module fails it will be fairly obvious (another thing I don't like as an installer, but that's another matter :cool:). In terms of energy production I honestly don't buy the hype, at least not for 98% of cases where they get installed. A string inverter, if installed properly to take shading into account, would have produced the same or nearly the same energy over time (or maybe more, depending on efficiency). The few cases where optimizers are really needed is in case there are multiple arrays of panels all facing in different directions/tilt-angle, and you don't have enough inputs on the inverter to deal with them all.

-RoB-

[Frank Shefman]

Interesting comments. My particular situation is as follows (all siliken 240 W): 9 Facing east at approx 265 degrees, 11 panels facing west at approx 76 degrees, and 6 south at 168 degrees- total 26 panels. Inclination varies depending upon the portion of the roof they are is on ( 25 to 45 degrees approx). Shading from trees is not a problem but portions of the array are shaded as the sun rotates from morning to night, so there is generally an angle of light hitting the panels as the sun moves across the sky. Some panels are getting full sun, while other panels are getting partial.

Benefits of a DC/DC or DC/AC microinverter are that they are able to provide data on the individual panels. This is entertaining for a month or so and I can see logging the data for a year or two but after that.....well I have other things to do. The info will tell me if a specific panel is not working. For me the significant benefit is the safety aspect, on my system potentially 26 volts moving through the system when turned off rather then a heck of a lot more voltage during daylight which could injure fireman, installers etc. This meets the new regulations and may impact on my insurance in the future, who knows.

From what I can see there is a benefit but marginal using this setup. My installer figures about 1% increased in generation net benefit overall. I would basically agree with him, although I am thinking it is in the range of 1%-3% but I cannot prove it. Would I use Solaredge again? Probably and only for the safety and reporting aspect but I will ask myself that question in the spring. If more optimizers fail, then that is another story. At least, with the one that failed based upon the website, we can identify which panel is affected without wasting time. This is efficient replacement. But again I now have to pay my installer to do a service call which affects my return. I went into it with my eyes wide open so have allowed for this in my calculation expecting some failures. One point that is interesting is my meter is reporting more production than my inverter. I'm not going to complain about that. Here is my public site so you can take a look at a solaredge portal: http://monitoring.solaredge.com/solaredge-web/public?name=Shefman%20Solar

[Rob Beckers]

Thanks for the SolarEdge link, I hadn't seen their portal yet. Looks very nice!

At least your installer is honest about the added benefit of optimizers. Few are, so that is to be admired.

For laughs and giggles (you can't compare directly): My roof did 604 kWh from August 11 through 31st (vs. 519 kWh for your roof), 720 kWh in September (vs. 606 kWh), and 324 kWh to date in October (vs. 220 kWh). I guess I got a little luckier in roof orientation (basically 1/3 of panels at 135 degrees, 2/3 of panels at 215 degrees, all 33-degree pitch).

It's great to make money with solar PV. All you got to do is watch the sun shine... :rolleyes:

-RoB-

[Frank Shefman]

I was just looking at various solar posts and came back to this one and thought I would give an update 9. months later. I'm very happy with the system although our typical Toronto winter was grey and dull. Once April/May came around the sun came out with ferocity. I now have 2 dark panels. These are panels that are not reporting so it is either communications, the modules or finally the actual Optimizer. My inverter says it is reading only 24 or the 26 panels. This is the down side of having micro inverters or DC/DC optimizers, but I went into it with my eyes open. So I've just emailed my installer and asked him to take a look and of course pay the price for his expertise. You can actually see the dark panels being reported by going my solaredge portal-http://monitoring.solaredge.com/solaredge-web/public?name=Shefman Solar

[Rob Beckers]

Frank, when communications fails, do those optimizers default to some sort of "bypass", so the panels still contribute and produce energy, or are they essentially switched off?

Two failed optimizers out of 26, in a year, is quite a high failure rate. Hopefully this is going to continue in the coming years.

Still going strong here: The maximum I've seen produced in a single day is 47kWh, and I'm happy to report the array is still able to do that (on a cold, windy, sunny day in March). So the panels don't seem to degrade much. With PV module prices going down the way they are I am seriously considering 'upgrading' the panels at some point in time. They are only 190W, while I can get 270W modules from Silfab in the same format now. I would leave the inverter in place (6kW), so neither the OPA nor the LDC can complain (under the rules at the time the size was determined by the lower of the panels or inverter).

Life with PV is good!

-RoB-

[Frank Shefman]

They may still be producing but just not communicating through the inverter and web interface but I doubt it. They are not registered with the inverter. I will keep you posted.

[Wilco Vercoelen]

Hi Frank,

We have been installing in the Barrie area string inverters (SMA & PowerOne) with Tigo Optimizers and without the Tigo Optimizers, but most of our installations are done with the Enphase M215.

I personally like Enphase the most (not the M190), simply because of the fact that the reliability so far is excellent and production is as expected, and the monitoring is great and we can take maximum advantage of the available roof space as per requests from clients. One side note here is the the production online is slightly different from reality as the monitoring is not calibrated, but we always look at the Hydro Meter for real production. And this counts for Tigo especially because Tigo measures DC kWh and not AC.
We had one failure from Enphase on dozens of installs.

My experience with the Tigo optimizers so far is good however it will costs more to install because it is more labour intensive. But I do have a more critical concern regarding Tigo, which is the temperature of the optimizers which greatly surpasses Enphase even though their claiming the advantage of cooler equipment. We have not installed SolarEdge and although the equipment is cheaper the cost to install I think will be similar to Tigo with a string inverter. We done thorough monitoring on SolarEdge and claims so far have been falling flat producing similar to Enphase, and in some cases even lower. I like the product though and we will likely install it in the near future.

We can't wait to see the new Enphase M250 with DC Isolated grounding and ground fault detection although I am not sure if ESA inspectors will be able to approve it as intended.

When comparing production numbers, the area the installation is in is a big factor but it is just one factor out of many factors that determine the real number.