I too spoke breifly with the CTO of Apparent who was kind enough to offer to explain the technology to me in person if I were able to visit their facility in the Bay Area.
When pushed to the detail he did say that it is false to claim that a smaller PV array used with the Apparent inverter will produce the same amount of energy and deliver the same economic benefit as a system using a standard inverter with a larger array. He said the did not like it when he heard that folk are out there making such claims. However, he did not seem to show much concern when I asked him what his group was doing to counteract the propogation of this mis-information within the marketplace. Mark Frye Berkeley Solar Electric Systems 303 Redbud Way Nevada City, CA 95959 (530) 401-8024 www.berkeleysolar.com -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dave Click Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 9:27 AM To: RE-wrenches Subject: Re: [RE-wrenches] Xslent? Standard residential utility meters couldn't care less about power factor and will ignore reactive power. Additional utility bill savings by using these reactive-capable microinverters is $0. Dan brought up a good point that adding too much capacitance also hurts power factor- so even if a utility did start caring about residential power factor, they wouldn't want these devices on every house because then their feeders would become excessively capacitive when motors weren't running. IMHO reactive power from these devices only makes sense if it's configurable and dispatchable by either the utility or a building's energy management system. And it doesn't seem to be. _______________________________________________ List sponsored by Home Power magazine List Address: [email protected] Options & settings: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/options.cgi/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org List-Archive: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/pipermail/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org List rules & etiquette: www.re-wrenches.org/etiquette.htm Check out participant bios: www.members.re-wrenches.org
