Solar panels produce DC power and must be converted to AC power to be useable by common household appliances or to be grid-tied (connected to your utility grid for your generated power to be sold back to your electricity provider). Inverters convert DC power to AC power, common solar PV systems have centrallized inverters that convert DC power to AC power for the PV array.
It is becoming more popular to use micro-inverters in place of centralized inverters. Micro-inverters are connected to each solar panel to convert DC power to AC power. This generally lowers the cost of the PV array as centralized inverters are more expensive than the sum of costs for micro-inverters and installation costs are lower.
AC Solar Panel modules connect together to form an AC branch circuit, which is wired to a breaker in your house’s main panel. The micro-inverters eliminate the need to calculate inverter string sizing, but installers will need to stay within circuit breaker and service entrance limitations.
Here are some advantages for using AC Solar Panels:
Increased performance. Each individual micro-inverter performs Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) to optimize its panel’s performance under conditions of varying sunlight and temperature. While centralized inverters also have MPPT capabilities, they average the performance of an entire “series string” of connected PV modules. This means that if one panel in the group is shaded, dirty or not working, it degrades the performance of the entire string. In conditions that are less than ideal, the micro-inverter may increase performance of the overall array.
Expandability for your Solar PV system. A great benefit to using AC Solar Panels is you can start with as many panels for your system as you like and add to the system over time. You won’t need to worry about using the same solar panels later on or having to buy a larger centralized inverter as your system grows.
No single point of failure in the system. When a centralized inverter fails, your whole system shuts down. With the distributed nature of the micro-inverters, if one of the AC solar Panels fail, the others continue to operate.
Safer to install. Having AC Solar Panels with AC output eliminates the dangers of working with high DC voltages (up to 600 V) for your solar PV array.
