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Think of a centralized solar system as a string of Christmas lights run in series. If one bulb goes out, the rest go with it. Even shading a portion of one panel in an array can drag the entire array’s energy harvest down. Enphase Energy has laid claim to being the first to produce a microinverter system available for commercial or residential applications. According to a friend of mine in the solar industry, “[Enphase Microinverter systems] are taking the solar world by storm.”
Microinverters reduce the bulk, space and noise of traditional inverters. A microinverter mounts below each PV panel, converts that panel’s DC current to AC and then ties directly into the existing wiring and power panel of the house. This saves the expense of heavy gauge copper wire, as well as the task of running it to your garage (or other centralized location) from the PV array. At a few dollars per foot, that wire amounts to a lot of money in labor and material.
According to the Enphase Energy website, their microinverter can boost performance of PV panels by 5%-25%. The benefit of one inverter per PV panel is the continued production of individual panels, even if one panel of the array is shaded or damaged. In traditional arrays where all the panels are tied together, the least efficient panel drags the rest to its level.
