Anotherpower.com Forum
Project Journals => User Journals => Steve => Topic started by: MadScientist267 on October 23, 2018, 01:27:15 pm
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Long story short, somewhere early on in the truck build, I made a simple but apparently life-course changing comment about "if nothing else, I'm building my resume"...
Well, in July this year I stumbled across a job fair for an upcoming solar farm installation to be built... Some time went by and I didn't hear anything back from them and more or less just kinda discarded the idea as "well it was fun to think about"...
A few weeks ago I get a call about coming up to join the team, and after some "fumbling" with some technicalities that put an additional delay on the process...
[attachimg=1]
I'm now one of them... ;D
So when someone tells you "I wouldn't mention the truck" in a chat room...
Yes, MENTION THE FRIGGIN TRUCK lol
Company and OSHA training behind me, I head into the fields of silicon tomorrow morning to help tie in the PV on a [relatively] small 26MWDC/20MWAC solar project here in northern Virginia, and as the safety guy doing the training put it...
"This is your launchpad for the 650 coming up next spring..."
:o :o :o :o :o
I'm so there ;)
Steve
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Congratulations Steve!!!!!!
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Congrats are in order Steve.
With your truck training, we know you will squeeze the last electron out of them panels.
Best of luck with it.
.......oztules
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Congratulations Steve. Another chapter has started.
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Hope it is a fun job Steve.
Will you be living in the truck when onsite?
Could add a few banks of ultra capacitors under it and charge them off the panels on the job.
Good luck
Pete
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Be safe..lots of luck...I miss working on the north slope...not just the money..had some great crews..fun times on the job..even thou your working your butt off..!
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Thanks guys.
Sorry it's taken me so long to respond... Yes, things are indeed pretty nuts. I've certainly seen things from a perspective now that few get to. It's mind boggling at times to think that while I've stood in a couple of spots now where "far as the eye can see" applies, this one is rather "tiny" in comparison to what's out there. :o
It's pretty cool but the challenges I expected to find are actually rather different than what they are. The entire process and setup is very easy to see (with the exception of the HVAC side, I haven't made my way to that end of an inverter yet).
That said, my job isn't particularly physically demanding, currently I'm doing QC for combiners. It's a bit mentally taxing knowing I'm the one that's supposed to catch something that could have major implications if it causes a failure down the line, but other than that it's mostly *insane* amounts of walking.
I have a good bit of OCD, and so there's aspects of it that are absolutely perfect for me, others not so much. I didn't count on the remote nature of the job somehow... not that I expected it to be "in someone's backyard right next door" or anything... lol
It didn't hit home for me until I had made the drive a couple times up here and then actually started, just how remote it is. I don't have the truck with me, no... Despite there being a Y right around the corner, the rest of it doesn't work out for it and so a hotel about 1.5 miles from the site was the best I could do to get rolling.
I started out walking it and that was the plan, but of course that's just mileage above and beyond the field. I'm of course not the only one up here on the project, there's now about 200 of us on site, and this is one of those (literally) 1 light towns... not much here, so a bunch of us stay in the same hotel, and I'm able to ride with one of them more often than not.
The other aspect is they push the labor all the way to limits in terms of time... OSHA states no more than 13 days on with a minimum of 1 off. Days are 10 hours. So yeah, there's a reward for it but it's hard work no matter how you're involved.
I'm not sure what I'm allowed to get away with in terms of pics, but I figure at least one won't hurt, and while I know this doesn't really do much for anyone outside of what a quick hit on a search engine can, this one, I was "very close by" when it was taken ;D
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The white box in the center is one of the inverters.
Thanks again goes out to everyone who in one way or another allowed me to reach a point where not only I could see all this but of course understand the big picture in the process. Most there only know their specific job or those aspects which they've been involved in... I'm one of the luckier ones I guess in that way... I don't see the forest for the trees on many things, but on this one I get everything that's going on and it's really cool to see up close.
Related: I think solar panels grow on trees... they're between 4 and 6 feet tall, have really long branches with square leaves, and I swear someone just planted a bunch of single cells in the ground and let them grow up :o ;) ;D
Y'all might be amazed at how fast those strings go up... it's crazy lol
Ok well until next time...
Steve
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As with any major job change, lots to learn, lots to adapt to. You're up to it.
Keep us posted, as you can.
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To think it all started so long ago in that Wal Mart parking lot and that nice girl handing you the keys to the Astro...
Congrats!
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Congrats Steve! 👏👏👏
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Indeed it did. Wild how things turn out ain't it.
Got a cool pic of the impending sunset tonight and managed to strip out all the "construction factor" just by pointing carefully hehe
[attach=1]
Things are moving along.
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Hi Steve, just wondering. Looking at the panels they seem to be only held down by two clips each side. Just how strong are the mounts?
What wind loading are the panel racks designed to withstand.
Not sure if you are anywhere near Tornado Alley, but they look a bit lightly built from the photos.
Hope you are enjoying the job
Pete
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Hi Steve, just wondering. Looking at the panels they seem to be only held down by two clips each side. Just how strong are the mounts?
I thought the same thing when I first saw them too, Pete, but other photos show that the support arm UNDER the panels is quite a lot longer and they are actually "reasonably well" supported.
I wouldn't like to see them in a tornado, but I suppose there's an argument that says if the wind is THAT strong, better to let the module go than break the torque arm and supports trying to hold them down!
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Yes, it's indeed a rather lightweight mounting system... You can see the detail of the brackets on the end of the one string there in the foreground. All the brackets are the same.
I don't pretend to know the entire philosophy behind the design, and I've wondered a few times myself how they'd hold up in any given scenario. That said, they do appear to be a bit stronger than they look at a glance.
I think the primary goal is installation speed with these, and they do go up at a rather insane rate. A crew of 4 can put up *well* over 500 panels in a day, using what amounts to only 2 tools. Experienced "glass throwers" (their term, not mine lol) occasionally do near double that, as per mention in our morning briefings.
With all of that in mind, there is definitely some flex that occurs along both the axis of rotation and perpendicular to it, as I've seen waves resembling the Tacoma narrows bridge during a breezy day, as well as a version that propagates when an end panel is given a good tug during an inspection.
I'm guessing that ultimately the design passes all the cringe checks "on the bench" because there's a whole lot of PV riding on it hehe
I guess time will tell huh
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Hi Steve here is another question. What string voltage do they use on such large arrays.
I have seen panels that caught fire on grid connect systems here in Australia. They were running something crazy like 600+ volts string voltage.
Sure the panel specs may allow for that but in practice printed circuits and panels can only hold back a certain voltage. In the cases I saw they didn't do that, a couple of sections melted causing the panel to catch fire.
Wow the glass throwers must work pretty fast, not much hope of long term employment at that pace, either the work or the body runs out sooner or later
Cheerio
Pete
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What string voltage do they use on such large arrays.
I believe Steve said in IRC that they're running 1050V in operation, about 1450VoC
I have seen panels that caught fire on grid connect systems here in Australia. They were running something crazy like 600+ volts string voltage.
600V is far from "crazy", it seems to be pretty much standard today.
My "grid tie" inverter actually wants 1400V but I'm running it at only 450V because it makes the installation and compliance much easier (and the switchgear, conduit, cable, connectors etc much cheaper)
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600v would likely been used in such scenarios so they can use wire with the cheaper insulation.
Cheap being a relative term.
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Hi Ross thanks for your answer. I am still concerned about such high voltages on panels. I used to repair valve amplifiers ( fortunately not too many) and managed to destroy a few multimeters because the high voltages would jump across the tracks in the switches.
I don't know if the panels I saw were faulty or not, one power company man said that they had a few panels catch fire. He said that they had no way of turning the rest off to stop the fire. I did suggest that he carries a dark coloured tarpaulin and just threw it over the other panels. He looked a bit surprised that I had offered such a simple solution.
I run my panels in 60 volt strings. That means that as I am no longer a licenced electrician in Tasmania, I can still do all the work myself. Anything under 100 volts DC is considered Extra low voltage and anyone can work on it and do the wiring. Fortunately we have very small power requirements, we have 2.2 kilowatts of panels and a 600 amp hour battery bank that does us fine.
Thanks again for your answer
Pete
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Ross is correct, ~1kV Vmp, 1.4kV Voc... around 9A Imp as I recall per string. So yeah if something breaks loose, even assuming the string fuse opens and isolates it from the rest in the combiner, there's still a lot of angry electrons wanting to go somewhere depending on how what went wrong lol
The currents at that voltage are what stand out at me... not so much a single string but when you "see the math done" on things like labels and there's obviously no mistake by the size of the cables, it's... ahem... enlightening... to say the least. Not that anyone can't or otherwise wouldn't do some subconscious math... it doesn't really hit home just how much power flows thru what you're seeing until you put the labels next to the wiring... lol it "changes everything"
I had a moment the other day where I just happened to gaze down at a single cell in a panel and the printed collection conductors got my attention... they're tiny as anyone that's seen them knows... but then I started to run away with the idea of how many bazillions of these little dinky "wires" does it take to collectively pump well over 3000A [not a typo] into an inverter (at the 1kV mind you lol)... :o
I stopped right there before my head exploded ;D