BackyardBandit
New Member
Bump. Has anyone ever figured out how to capture "total production" from a Sol-Ark (or EG4) inverter, not just the exported energy to the grid?
PV production meter (for SRECs) with Sol-Ark hybrid inverter
- Thread starter troy303
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houseofancients
Solar Wizard
Something like this ?
BackyardBandit
New Member
The "Solar PV" value should be correct if the CT's are revenue grade. Would be nice if there was a way to display it in a monthly value instead of daily without having to do math manually.
Correct me if I'm mistaken: the value for SREC reporting would be ((Load Consumption + Exported to Grid) - Imported from Grid).
I wonder if there's a standalone RGM that can automatically math this out and display the monthly total.
houseofancients
Solar Wizard
ct's are revenue grade, using an external meter ( SDM630 )
you forgetting losses and self consumption.
btw this is a default view of solar assistant
Mike 134
Solar Enthusiast
BackyardBandit
New Member
So
With hybrid setups, there's PV produced power that can go out of the grid connection AND the load connections. Wouldn't that necessitate an additional set of CT's on the "load" side of the inverter?
I'm trying to figure out an approved (by GATS) way to capture total system production from a hybrid inverter (Sol-Ark and EG4) with revenue grade CT's. As I have come to understand these inverters don't have that function natively.
I believe houseofancients has the answer, now I just need to figure out how to do all that and get the system to report it in a way that an SREC aggregator can make sense of it as these will be customer owned systems, and I need to make it dummy proof. All of our other grid-tied systems have a way for an SREC aggregator to view the data remotely, eliminating the customer from the reporting process.
Understood, that's how it works with pretty much all grid tied inverters, a pair of CT's capture the values as they exit the inverter through the AC connections.My SREC payment is based only on production.
Consumer FAQs – Illinois Shines
illinoisshines.com
With hybrid setups, there's PV produced power that can go out of the grid connection AND the load connections. Wouldn't that necessitate an additional set of CT's on the "load" side of the inverter?
I'm trying to figure out an approved (by GATS) way to capture total system production from a hybrid inverter (Sol-Ark and EG4) with revenue grade CT's. As I have come to understand these inverters don't have that function natively.
I believe houseofancients has the answer, now I just need to figure out how to do all that and get the system to report it in a way that an SREC aggregator can make sense of it as these will be customer owned systems, and I need to make it dummy proof. All of our other grid-tied systems have a way for an SREC aggregator to view the data remotely, eliminating the customer from the reporting process.
houseofancients
Solar Wizard
not really, every hybrid has internal shunts to measure output
CT's / External meter are used to find power usage that the Hybrid can't measure by itself.
There for a CT/Meter should be connected/mounted as close to the power entry point as possible
they do
BackyardBandit
New Member
Well then, that certainly makes it simple. Thanks much!
Beloved Sun
New Member
I learned recently that last year, Ohio systems became eligible to sell into the PA Tier 1 REC market. This is different than SRECs, which are for systems in PA, but the boundaries are different for Tier 1. The prices are decent ($35), and the same vendors can probably still help you, so you might consider trying to sell them if you can figure out a way! I'm still working on configuring a meter on my 15k to jump on this...
Our system was installed in 2013. The folks doing the installation were new to the whole SREC/revenue thing, and had to come back out after the fact & install a revenue grade meter between the string inverter and the regular AC meter. It's a Locus LGate-101E, which includes an Ethernet feed to an on-line recording/tracking system. The SREC's in Massachusetts were running around $250-$300 per MWh, and we were getting an additional $1K a year that way. The SREC program is only good for the first 10 years of the system, after which you can get "vanilla" REC's. Those are only about $50/MWh.
Locus used to charge us $300 for a 5 year contract to automatically report the SREC's to the state broker. It didn't make sense to pay that when we only get non-solar REC's, so we didn't re-new that contract. It's wasn't clear if the contract included the on-line monitoring, but that is still working, so we use that to report the production to the state broker.
I'm not familiar with "hybrid" systems and how they tie into things, but something similar to the Locus box should do the trick. I believe that model is obsolete now, but there must be others out there. Ours doesn't have any sort of local readout, so if Locus discovers our contract has expired and it was paying for the web interface, we could be screwed. I'd definitely get one with a local readout, even if it has an on-line monitoring setup (which I think is pretty standard these days).
Locus used to charge us $300 for a 5 year contract to automatically report the SREC's to the state broker. It didn't make sense to pay that when we only get non-solar REC's, so we didn't re-new that contract. It's wasn't clear if the contract included the on-line monitoring, but that is still working, so we use that to report the production to the state broker.
I'm not familiar with "hybrid" systems and how they tie into things, but something similar to the Locus box should do the trick. I believe that model is obsolete now, but there must be others out there. Ours doesn't have any sort of local readout, so if Locus discovers our contract has expired and it was paying for the web interface, we could be screwed. I'd definitely get one with a local readout, even if it has an on-line monitoring setup (which I think is pretty standard these days).
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