Gamesa India intends to manufacture 1500V solar inverters

Country’s major wind turbine company, Gamesa India is ensuring to make its presence felt in Solar by manufacturing inverters at its new blade plant at Nellore, Andhra Pradesh.

Ramesh Kymal, company’s Chairman and Managing Director said that the inverters that will be produced at Gamesa India’s facility are the ‘1500V inverters’, for which there is a growing market.

The solar photovoltaic industry is now moving towards the ‘1500V architecture’, from the erstwhile 600V and 1000V capacity. The effect of which is to reduce costs further, estimated between 30 lakh and 50 lakh per MW.

The ‘1500V architecture’ basically means that the solar modules are connected in such a way to handle higher voltage, which implies lesser current in the system.

As a consequence, there will be savings in components such as combine boxes and length of cables.

Industry experts say that this was not possible earlier, because the inverter technology was not developed for the 1500V architecture. However, it has now. As such, there is a big demand for 1500V inverters and there is a supply constraint.

Gamesa wishes to catch this trend. Making the inverters locally would help the company be competitive, Kymal mentioned.

He said that Gamesa’s customers for wind turbine are asking the company to also build solar power plants for them. Gamesa has so far commissioned 67 MW of solar power projects (for others) in India.

The company is looking forward to construct another 150 MW in the current year. As such, it has a captive market for its inverters.

Source: Hindu