How does the increase in component current affect the cost of inverters?

In July, Trina Solar released a 600W+ module with a positive short-circuit current of 18.42A and an open-circuit voltage of 41.7V. Calculations show that in a 1500V system, each string can have a maximum of 33 modules, and the power of a single string is increased by about 41%. The benefits brought by this are: reducing the amount of brackets by 15%, the amount of bracket foundations by 16%, and the number of junction boxes by 31%, while reducing the amount of cables by 8% and the construction cost by 7%, thereby reducing the BOS cost by about 8 cents/W.

The short-circuit current of the component is 18.42A, and the string current of the inverter must be at least 20A. There is currently no matching string inverter on the market. If you want to do it, the power devices are ready-made, and you just need to change the string current, which is not difficult for the inverter. It is only a small-scale change and will take about half a year. By February next year, the 600W component will be in mass production, and the switch will be perfect.

So, what will be the cost of an inverter with a string current of 20A compared to an inverter with a string current of 12.5A? Let's first look at the design. If it is a 100KW system, using 600W components, according to the maximum 1.4 times over-matching, about 240 components need to be installed. For an 1100V system, 20 components are recommended to be connected in series, so the inverter needs to have 6 MPPTs/12 strings. At present, the strings of inverters with a string current of 12.5A are mostly 10 MPPTs/20 strings. In comprehensive comparison, the current has increased, and the price of a single power module and boost inductor will increase by about 20%, but because the number of strings has decreased by 40%, the overall cost has still decreased.

However, not all solutions can reduce costs. For example, the SMA Sunny Tripower CORE2 inverter adopts a solution that combines two strings into one, and increases the power by increasing the number of strings. For example, a 100kW inverter requires 12 MPPTs/24 strings.

The number of strings has increased, and it can indeed be "installed" more than Sungrow's 9-way MPPT/100KW inverter and Huawei's 10-way MPPT/125KW inverter.

However, SMA, are you sure that Huawei Sunshine will be as good as you and use a 13A inverter to connect 600W components instead of developing a 20A inverter? You should know that 13A/12-way MPPT/24-way string is more expensive than 20A/6-way MPPT/12-way string.

However, all this will only be known after the 600W components go into mass production next year. Let us wait and see.