TRITEC & TUGE Energia: Multipluses with grid connected wind turbine

TRITEC is an international group of companies specialising in photovoltaic systems. With over 5,000 solar projects every year they are obviously a valued Victron Energy customer. Solar it seems is not their only specialisation either as they have, together with TUGE Energia, integrated a number of Victron Multipluses into a grid connected TUGE^® wind turbine system.

Simon Schmidt of TRITEC kindly put us in touch with Sergei Melentjev, the CTO of TUGE Energia who are based in Tallinn, Estonia. Under the TUGE^® trademark, Sergei and his team have developed and manufactured a range of small 10 and 20 kW wind turbines.

The headline image above shows a number of Multipluses integrated into a grid connected wind and solar system installed in the grounds of Pühtitsa Convent, which is an orthodox women’s convent in the eastern part of Estonia.

Pühtitsa Convent and livestock farm

The convent itself has two 20 kW wind turbines installed, with a further 20 kWp of solar planned at the end of the year. The convent though has no need for battery storage, as power outages don’t affect the lives of the inhabitants that much. However, there is also a livestock farm nearby (where some of the nuns work) where reliable power is far more important.

TUGE Energia Wind Turbine

At this location it is in fact crucial that grid power is supplied with battery backed AC electricity. This is achieved with a TUGE^® 20 kW wind turbine, 15 kW of TRITEC solar panels, Victron Multiplus inverters in a three-phase configuration with two strings which gives 18 kW in total plus 1,300 Ah of battery backup capacity. This all allows 20-22 hours of autonomous operation, further backed up by a diesel generator (should the batteries become empty) which is started automatically by the Victron Multiplus system.

Praise for Victron

Speaking to Sergei this is what he had to say about the Victron Energy products used:

“What we found really good about the Multiplus is that it provides grid synchronisation – the wind turbine we have there is an on-grid variant, so it needs to be connected to the grid to operate. In case of grid failure, the Multiplus provides a grid reference signal for our turbine, so it doesn’t detect that there is no grid and continues to work in normal operation”.

Solar/Wind system schematic

A general Multiplus system schematic with grid connected converter for solar and/or a wind-turbine looks like that shown below. A larger size PDF of this schematic is here.

The only difference with the project above compared to the general schematic below, is that they have a grid connection on the load side and during normal operation the load is not supplied through the Multiplus, but directly from the grid. Also the PV array and wind turbine can sell energy back to the grid.

Multiplus with wind and solar

Conclusion

Thanks to Bob Hopman of Victron Energy for making me aware of this project and Sergei Melentjev of TUGE Energia for the information used in this blog, not forgetting TRITEC who supplied the Victron Energy products that made this installation possible.

John Rushworth