This white paper from Alencon discusses the practical considerations of deploying a PV-centric, DC-coupled solar plus storage system. This paper has been written for a wide audience to help it understand what is involved in combining solar and storage, from the what doing so actually means to different methods for doing so. It will focus on the relative technical and economic benefits of deploying Solar + Storage with a PV Centric, DC-coupled approach, along with an overview of such a system.
This paper aims to explain all the “buzzwords” used in this field today in a way that can be easily understood by a broad audience of readers ranging from those interested in developing Solar + Storage projects to those who will be involved in the design and specification of such systems. As such, whenever we use a term that could be considered a “buzzword”, Alencon seeks to explain the term in plain English.
The combination of Solar and Storage has been called the “Holy Grail” of Solar generation, because melding these two technologies lets us generate clean power with a free energy source, solar, and store either some or all of it to use at another time, and then dispatch it as required.