Carlo Gavazzi Enters the Solar Energy Market in North America

Energy costs are becoming a significant expense in most processes. With increased energy unit costs, decreased generating capacity, and the environmental concerns with the burning of fossil fuels, it is important that companies reduce their electrical consumption by turning to alternative energy sources.

Carlo Gavazzi offers a broad range of solar energy meters and power quality meters and transducers for monitoring energy consumption as well as problems with power quality. Carlo Gavazzi has been a major player in this market in Europe for years. They're now marketing their solar energy solutions in North America and we are an authorized distributor and control system design integrator for their products. We can also build the solar energy electrical control panels for you.

In addition, with the move towards renewable energy, monitoring of photovoltaic strings is becoming important in order to maximize generating capacity. Our EOS-Array system allows you to monitor the current, voltage, power, temperature, and irradiation levels of your entire solar energy installation.

In order to interface with external systems, output options include :

• Relays
• Analogue
• RS232
• RS485
• Ethernet (Modbus and BacNet)

Solutions for solar energy from Carlo Gavazzi include:

• Expandable PV Management modules
• Power Quality modules to ensure the correct power is supplied to the grid
• Solar Battery Chargers - featuring laden battery chargers for 12, 24 & 48 VDC output
• Atmospheric Sensing products - monitor wind speed, solar irradiation and air temperature
• Energy Management & Data Collection - Monitoring, management and data acquisition of various electrical parameters

Solar Energy Solution - Eos-Array for Photovoltaic Plants

The expandable Eos-Array is a combination of modules which perform the complete monitoring and control of a photovoltaic plant. The core unit is the VMU-M which performs the local bus management of the measuring units, the VMU-S and the VMU-P, as well as the I/O unit, the VMU-O. The VMU-M features RS485 serial communications and assigns the proper local unit address automatically. It also gathers all the local measurements coming from VMU-S and VMU-P measuring units. The VMU-M can provide, by means of VMU-O modules, two relay outputs to manage alarms and/or external loads (such as a lighting system, a PV washing system, etc.) and two PV panel temperature inputs. The VMU-S is the DC string level power measuring unit (generated by the PV panel), which also features a built-in fuse holder. The VMU-P collects relevant environmental data (through external sensors) such as wind speed, air temperature and sun irradiation. The Eos-ArraySoft is free software, which automatically or manually can download the Eos-Array system memory to the PC, for further PV plant efficiency calculations and alarm analysis.

Sunbright Solar Battery Charger

The new SUNBRIGHT Solar Battery Charger features an advanced design, featuring a load and lighting control device which implements a microcontroller to assure digital accuracy and automatic operations. It can be used for 12, 24 and 48 VDC systems and can perform three main functions including solar battery charging, load and lighting control. The pulse width modulation (PWM) battery charging has been optimized for longer battery life and the innovative day and night auto-detector has been precisely designed to log the different length of night hours for lighting control, no matter where and when SUNBRIGHT is installed, whether it's in the North or in the South, or whether it's winter or summer.

Contact AMPS Industrial Controls to discuss your application or to obtain more detailed information on these products.