Electricity generated from solar plants is typically stored in batteries to provide steady, continuous power for a duration of time. Therefore deep discharge (also known as deep cycle batteries) are used. This is a type of lead acid battery that can repeatedly discharge itself by more than 50% of its full charge, without being damaged. These batteries are different from automotive batteries, which are designed to primarily drive starter motors – heavy discharge for short durations of time.

Solar PV systems are usually combined with VRLA (Valve Regulated Lead Acid) batteries. These are a type of sealed battery that requires little […]

Imagine you are running a factory and have a solar plant on your rooftop. Your factory is shut on Sunday. What happens to the power generated by the solar plant on your rooftop on Sunday, when there is little to no load to use that solar power?

Answer: Without any load to use that power, the solar power generated goes to waste. Remember, this is solar power you have already paid for by installing the plant, so wasting power is wasting the money you have invested in the plant.

Still worse, this surplus power may flow out from your facility into the […]

Recently, the top honchos of two top solar firms in the US, SunPower and SolarCity, echoed a similar view: Seeking complete independence from the grid through the use of rooftop solar is naïve (http://storage.pv-tech.org/news/sunpower-ceo-grid-independence-is-naive ).

It is not just in the US that industrial and commercial users are keen on using solar, especially rooftop solar, to get independence from the grid.

A similar trend is taking place in India as well.

In one of the first rooftop solar projects Solar Mango worked on, the CEO of the company putting up the plant had a rather idealistic ambition – he wanted some portions of […]

At Solar Mango, one of our research activities has been to understand the use of rooftop solar for reducing diesel consumption, especially for industrial and commercial enterprises.

On the face of it, it looks like a no-brainer:

Diesel based power costs Rs. 15-20 per unit, while rooftop solar power costs less than Rs. 5 per unit (Solar Mango insists it is even less than Rs. 4)

Rs. 5 vs. Rs. 20. If solar could replace 100% diesel, I could be saving 75% of costs of power generated from diesel. Could there be an easier decision to make?

Well, it turns out that diesel vs. […]

At Solar Mango we repeatedly remind our clients and our readers about the importance of sizing a rooftop PV plant correctly when integrating with a diesel generator, as the solar plant can affect the efficiency of the DG. A poorly sized PV plant can cause greater diesel consumption than before, despite supporting part of the load. We recently performed an analysis on PV sizing for a client that could serve as an interesting case study on Solar PV plant sizing when integrating with a Diesel Generator.

Why integrate Solar PV with Diesel?

Solar PV plants need to be integrated with a diesel […]

Rooftop solar has been growing at a significant pace in many countries worldwide

Germany leads, with over a million rooftops sporting solar panels
USA has over 6 GW of rooftop solar as of mid-2014
Japan has an incredible 95% of their total 10 GW of solar in rooftops, so that would be a cool 9 GW

So, should not India join the race too? While India’s current rooftop solar installations are nothing to write home about, we at Solar Mango believe that the next few years could change all that.

Let us look what indeed could be realistic estimates for rooftop solar installations in India […]