Is the solar industry prepared for a wave of end-of-life inverters?

Many commercial and utility-scale solar projects installed at the beginning of the solar construction boom are celebrating their 10th birthday around the year 2020. But instead of something to revel, this milestone is a nuisance for many project owners given that the string inverters on these systems are nearing their average 15-year lifespans.

In a new report, Wood Mackenzie estimated that approximately 4.2 GWDC of global solar assets will run into premature failures in 2020, with the annual total jumping to 36 GWDC in 2025.

The big question is — are project owners adequately prepared for the O&M necessary to handle an influx of expired inverters between now and 2025?

The monitoring conundrum

In the study, Wood Mackenzie found the basic scope of solar O&M contracts cover very few basic maintenance activities.

Silvia Blumenschein-Schütz, CEO of solar monitoring provider Solar-Log, has found a similar theme in conversations with project owners. She recalls an EPC approaching her at a solar tradeshow in early 2020, saying he was thinking about adding monitoring to his portfolio of about 10,000 projects. She mentioned it would be helpful to also add monitoring hardware to the inverters to collect more comprehensive performance data, and he bristled at the thought of having to visit every site to install them.

“I said, ‘Don’t you go out there one time per year?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘I don’t see a need for that,'” Blumenschein-Schütz said. “If you just talk about the typical residential/commercial/industrial sector, I think we would all be surprised to learn how many sites are not properly monitored yet. People don’t know that they are losing a lot of money, and how easy it is to get back into that business to make money on the long term.”

Read the full story at solarpowerworldonline.com