“COP Meetings: Navigating the Road to Climate Resilience”
As nations convene at COP meetings, the discourse extends beyond mitigation strategies to navigating...
December 5, 2023
About the project
Solar Consultants Firstgreen Limited is a solar EPC and consulting firm specialized in providing Trunkey solutions for stand alone off grid and minigrid solutions to African market. Firstgreen has strong know how on the solar PV with energy storage solutions and has tie ups with best of its class suppliers. Firstgreen provides range of grid connected and off grid solutions to its clients in Africa region.
Firstgreen is an expert EPC and consulting firm in providing solar plus energy storage solutions with diesel generators. There are lot of resorts in Kenya which continuously run on diesel generators. This case study is an example of how these remote facilities can migrate towards the green solutions.
The system consists of a 100 kW Sinexcel inverter with 200 kWh Pylontech Li Ion battery. Solar panels generate electricity right since the morning and feeds electricity to the resorts loads directly. If the resort has low energy demand, the power is fed to the battery for charging the batteries. When the solar PV generation is low or in the night the loads are powered through the batteries. If the batteries are drained out the diesel generators automatically starts and feed the power to the loads. The surplus power of the diesel generators is also used to charge the batteries. This way the diesel generator running hours are reduced significantly and about 70% diesel savings are realised.
In the second phase of this project, once the resort loads have increased, additional inverter and battery capacities shall be added to make the system fully independent of the diesel generators.
System Block
Best of the system configuration
The system consists of 100 kWp solar panels of 550 Wp each monoperc solar panels. The energy storage is from Pylontech US2000 Li Ion battery modules with total rack capacity of 200 kWh. The system is fully integrated system with Sinexcel inverters 100 kW capacity. ComAp control for solar PV+ESS+DG integration. The diesel generators are from Jakson -Cummines Diesel generators. CAN Multi protocol has been used for communication module
Project Outcome
A fully integrate reliable clean power source
The Sinexcel inverters with Pylontech energy storage system was integrated in a containerized system and works in tandem with three diesel generators. The project generates about 150,000 kWh of clean energy on annual basis and reduces about 450,000 Lt of diesel consumption in the diesel generators. The system provides about 70% reduction in the diesel consumption of the resort. The payback period of the system is less than three years.
System design
Solar mini grid solution
Firstgreen design team analysed the resort loads and configured the system sizing to meet the reliable power supply. The system can operate all the loads of the resort including the laundry machines, ovens, pumps, and other kitchen equipments. The Sinexcel inverter operates at 650V DC with MPPT charge controller features and inbuilt BMS and EMS solutions. The inverter is high efficiency of 95% and provides efficient operation with diesel generators. The battery management system perfactly manages the charging and discharging cycles of the Li Ion batteries. The overall operation of the system is controlled by energy management system which communicates with the diesel generators through Comap hybrid DG controllers. .
Commissioning
Implementation
The complete system design and commissioning has been done by Firstgreen design and engineering team in India and project has been commissioned by our local team in Kenya.
