Alencon Systems LLC will debut the outdoor rated, pad mounted form factor of its unique Bi-Directional Optimizer for Storage Systems – the BOSS - at SPI 2019 in Salt Lake City, Utah September 24 – 26 in booth #2629. This new approach to deploying the BOSS offers DC-coupled Solar + Storage projects as well as stand-alone grid scale storage projects the best of both worlds – the granularity of battery rack charge and discharge with the convenience of a single, outdoor rated, pad mounted cabinet for ease of installation along with the flexibility of galvanic isolation.
The standard outdoor, cabinet-based package is designed to hold four BOSS units and is rated at 320 – 350 KW, all in a slender, easy to install package. Each BOSS unit in the cabinet can be easily replaced and installed in the field, allowing for easy O&M with no field serviceable critical parts. The BOSS’s galvanic isolation offers a great deal of flexibility in deploying Solar + Storage. Each BOSS cabinet comes integrated with the Alencon Communication Environment, allowing for unprecedentedly powerful and secure communications and control with a battery energy storage system (BESS) and plant controllers.
“The new centralized BOSS we’ll be debuting at SPI 2019 is a real ‘win-win-win’ for Solar + Storage project developers and installers” says Hanan Fishman, Alencon Systems President. “This new deployment option offers the benefit of rack level battery charging with the convenience of a single point of installation outdoors. This new approach has the benefit of easy maintenance because each BOSS unit can easily be swapped out if needed. This can assure the highest possible uptime easiest possible approach to maintenance.”
More about the BOSS
The Alencon BOSS is a unique solution for both improving and bringing down the cost of DC-Coupled Solar + Storage deployments while extending the useful life of the batteries and improving battery rack utilization. The BOSS controls the charge and discharge of individual battery racks in both DC and AC coupled deployments. The BOSS supports the integration of energy storage with 600, 1000 or 1500-volt PV strings and batteries of any voltage level. This allows higher voltage PV to be easily incorporated with lower voltage batteries. The BOSS can also be used for stand-alone storage deployments.
The BOSS features Alencon’s patented Galvanically Isolated DC-DC conversion topology. This unique architecture offers users a number of benefits not available from other non-isolated DC-DC converters, including the ability to incorporate grounded PV systems with floating batteries on the same DC-bus as well as the ability to pair high voltage 1500-volt PV with lower voltage battery chemistries. Additionally, because the BOSS is a rack level DC-DC converter it assures the most optimal utilization of each battery rack in the cabinet. By addressing each battery rack individually, the BOSS also improves system safety by limiting the fault currents in the case of a sudden short to ground thus potentially reducing system cost by eliminating the need for additional safety devices. Additionally, the BOSS makes battery rack augmentation over the life of a storage project much easier and cost effective by allowing battery racks with different charge-discharge voltages to be installed onto the same DC-bus. Very uniquely, the BOSS also makes it easy to deploy DC-coupled Solar + Storage projects with string inverters or central inverters. The BOSS units can be deployed inside of a battery container, individually outdoors or in an outdoor rated cabinet-based form factor as explained above.
About Alencon
Alencon’s solutions for ALternative ENergy CONversion provide high modularity and scalability for systems from several megawatts to several-hundred megawatts. By helping to dramatically reduce balance of system costs and increase power production through new inverter and energy harvesting technology, Alencon helps advance the state of the art and increase the financial viability of solar power. Headquartered in Hatboro, Pennsylvania, has been building PV power conversion hardware since 2009, drawing on the combined decades of power electronics experience of its engineering team.