Aptly named Peak Power Pvt. Ltd., based in Kathmandu, Nepal, certainly take top honours for the most challenging of Victron Energy equipped installations.
Last time they hand carried:
“…3 x 30 Kg Victron Mutiplus inverter/chargers up a 2,000m mountain before even beginning to read the manuals…”
This time their project includes 120 electricity poles before we even start with the 6 x 8kVA Quattros and batteries – but at least on this occasion there was 4 wheel drive assistance for part of it.
Getting to Location
Olane Community Microgrid
Olane [oh/lane/ee] is a remote community of 65 families in the Eastern mountains of Nepal. The village has no connection to the national utility grid.
However – from April this year, the village has been operating on a solar-based micro-grid providing all the households with access to clean and reliable energy, via four kilometres of overhead lines to distribute the electricity throughout the village, not to mention all those batteries that needed to be carried!
Residents of Olane Village are now able to utilise clean and reliable energy during the day or night for productive use – such as lighting, cooking, communications, education, water pumping, water treatment, health care and medicine storage. Energy consumption and billing is carried out via smart meters installed at the service entrance.
Equipment
- 6 x Victron Energy Quattro 8 kVA inverters stacked to provide 39kW nominal capacity.
- 6 x Victron Energy MPPT solar charge controllers provide 510A of charging.
- 1 x Victron GX Color Control for System monitoring and control.
- 120 electricity poles for 4 kilometres of power lines.
- 81 x Trina solar 315PD-14 solar modules provide 25kW of energy generation.
- 4,000Ah of 2V industrial VLRA batteries.
- 1 x 3G internet communications via the local provider.
- Switch boards and the balance of system components designed and built by Peak Power.
Conclusion
Power it seems brings lots of smiles!
My thanks to Rakesh Shrestha/Joel Basham of Peak Power Pvt. Ltd., Kathmandu, Nepal for the images and information used in this blog – have any of our readers matched his project for the sheer difficulty of logistics? If you have we’d love to hear from you.
John Rushworth
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