Several years ago, Inovateus committed to becoming environmental stewards to ensure that they would become leaders in sustainable solar development. But what does “sustainable development” mean?
While we are aware of the various definitions for environmental, social, and governance (ESG), they weren’t a great fit for the solar industry, which touches construction, product procurement, waste, land preservation, and other factors.
With that in mind, we have developed our own six best practices for sustainable solar development. Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore each best practice in a series of blog posts. First, let’s start from the beginning: Design.
Best Sustainable Solar Practice #1. Create the most optimal system design
Solar projects can be more sustainable by producing more power per square foot, leading to a smaller project footprint. To use less land, we start with the design and component selection.
Solar design
Producing the maximum kilowatt-hours for every solar project is the top priority. The Inovateus engineering team consistently meets or exceeds production projections in system design, yet they are always aware that their choices can greatly impact sustainability.
Selecting low-impact components. Long-standing supplier relationships allow Inovateus to design systems with components projected to be available to the market at project notice to proceed (NTP). These products include a variety of tracker options for racking, highly optimized inverter power (VAR power and frequency regulation), energy storage, and very efficient plus high wattage solar modules, as well as bi-facial options.
Reducing cable quantities
In the interest of reducing wire lengths and cable costs, Inovateus often designs arrays to be built with centralized string inverters rather than dispersing more inverters throughout the array. By designing a distributed system of combiner boxes, Inovateus saves significant amounts of PV wire. Also, because the runs from combiners to inverters are DC instead of AC, our design team can eliminate an entire phase’s worth of cable. In addition, when inverters are located immediately next to switchgears, cables between those pieces of equipment are significantly shortened.
Above-ground wire management
Above-ground wire management reduces ground disturbance and labor intensity while also reducing installation time by at least 10%. Above-ground wires can also reduce wire size because we can use the free air cable sizing table in the National Electric Code.
By implementing all of these sustainable solar design options, project costs are fully optimized, and Inovateus can provide PV production at the best possible dollar-per-kWh without sacrificing our sustainability goals.
Now that we’ve designed a sustainable system, our next post will discuss how Inovateus uses best sustainable practices for solar equipment procurement.
