Solar Works At Night. Here’s How.

There’s a technology already available that makes petroleum companies join hands with renewable energy. This technology exists to make existing grids better. So what’s this company — Lightsource, UK’s largest solar installer and the third-largest installer in the world outside China.

BP and Lightsource

BP acquired 43% of the company and it was renamed Lightsource BP. One of the biggest problems regarding electricity supply has been matching supply and demand. Electricity is produced on demand, not stored. So power plants generally estimate the demand every day and produce electricity as such.

Real and Reactive Power

The point is to maintain a balance between real power and reactive power. Real power is the power that turns your appliances on when you flick the switch, but every device has a voltage and current rating. So maintaining this voltage and current levels are necessary grid wide. (You cannot connect a 220V toaster on 180V, it will break). Else it will cause huge damage to distribution and generation equipment and cause large blackouts.

Reactive power is generated or absorbed on the grid in general by generators, this is called voltage support
If voltage support is required, The generator provides voltage assistance. Then it can grow quite heated, which might be dangerous, diminish this ability to provide genuine results power that customers may put to use and that is how genuine power is provided. Electricity generators are compensated based on their output. As a result of the wholesale energy market, the grid usually has to adjust for sources of this revenue loss via out-of-market payments. But this allows massive amounts of energy to be transmitted using existing infrastructure.

The Inverter

Solar panels produce DC while AC is used for transmission and running appliances. So pannels use an inverter to convert DC to AC.So Lightsource BP with a bit of tinkering in the software of the inverters has developed a way to use them as reactive energy providers. At night time when solar panels are dormant, the inverter can be used to reduce or increase voltage levels as required before sending them back out.

Lighthouse BP in 2019 conducted their trial in East Sussex in the South of England to provide reactive power support service. In which the inverters acted as a bridge to steer up and down the voltage as required. This whole addition of inverters increased network safety and reliability with no adverse effect on the customer.

Conclusion

Solar power will play a huge part in the renewable transition, but as we make the transition we have to improve the current grid to make existing tech more reliable. This trial run after three years of testing was made part of the national grid in the UK. As solar plants provide more support at night time the returns increase making it a more viable and usable source of energy.