Operating experience at the 500 kW photovoltaic plant PHALK Mont-Soleil

A 500 kW photovoltaic power plant has been realised on Mont-Soleil in Switzerland as a national research, development and demonstration project. Together with Electrowatt and the Bernese Power, various other companies are involved in this Project. ABB Drives AG has realised the main component of the project which is a new RC GTO-based PWM inverter configuration for feeding the active power in a 16 kV grid. A new decoupled control scheme for active and reactive power control with a superposed maximum power point tracker has been optimised. The PSR based control system includes closed-loop and open-loop control functions, and allows the full automatic operation of the plant all through the year. The authors describe the system and report the start-up and operation experience of this large scale solar energy system.<
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