Back in the early 2000s, industry critiques used to say that solar electricity installations were thrown together by a bunch of cowboys. As always, it only takes one or two bad eggs to ruin the reputation of an industry. In those days every solar installation was a stand-alone system, not connected to the grid, so there were many more components such as batteries and regulators.
Hearing this criticism, Standards Australia set about writing the Standards AS/NZS 4509 Stand-alone PV Systems and AS4086 Secondary Batteries. The Clean Energy Council (then the BCSE) and the Clean Energy Regulator (then ORER) united together to ensure that customers did not receive rebates or incentives from the Federal purse unless the solar systems installed complied with these Standards.
In addition, the Federal Government funded retrospective inspections to flush out these rogue installers and installations. The industry was almost clean by the time the Government announced they were funding both stand-alone and grid-connected solar installations for home owners and schools across Australia. This funding was very generous however solar panels, inverters and the balance of systems were very expensive. Any way there was a huge uptake of residential customers installing 1kW systems on their roofs.
The availability of Federal funding and the decrease in prices of systems soon meant that any Australian could ‘purchase’ a solar system for next to nothing. This again attracted the fly-by-night companies into the industry. If the installed system was cheaper than the rebate and incentives, then these companies could ‘print money’. Some even set up call-centres to goad Australians into purchasing. This resulted in a huge demand for systems, most of which were coming from China. Of course this huge demand soon dwindled supply as the rest of the world was also riding the solar wave. Waiting times were excessive and by the time the government urgently stemmed the flow of funding, there were thousands of customers waiting for their installations. The government allowed about 12 months for the installations to happen. Towards the end of this period some companies were forced to sell off the installations they could not complete.
Inspecting some of these installations revealed some shoddy workmanship. For instance DC cables could be seen hanging beneath the solar panels down onto the roof below. The Standards now insist that all DC cables must be mechanically secured and protected by heavy-duty conduit. DC cables could be simply run through roof spaces; now they must also be run in a heavy-duty conduit. There are new rules for DC isolators and their mechanisms modified for safety.
A new inverter standard was written named AS4777. Linesmen working on poles and wires are always anxious when there’s an outage. What if there’s a solar installation of this line? Consequently grid inverters were rigorously tested to ensure they switched off the instant the AC dropped off. This is called ‘anti-islanding’. This meant that the house with the solar panels was not the only house in the street with power during an outage. The linesmen are eternally grateful.
Inverters are often installed out of the way and are not regularly monitored. Sometimes inverters can fail and they remain in that state for a long time, meanwhile the owner does not benefit from the solar installation. The Standard now requires that should an earth-fault arise in the inverter, that the inverter must ‘make someone do something’. Inverters have in-built wi-fi, blue-tooth, RS232, etc and one of these preferred channels must be used to alert the owner or installer of the fault.
These are just some of the many Standards adhered to by Energis. They use CEC accredited personnel for all their installations. Please call them today on 1300 782 217 for a free solar appraisal of your premises.
