Solar installations

General aspects of solar installations in Colombia:

Solar systems can be used for homes, offices, public buildings, car parks or remote sites. They can be installed on roofs, terraces or on building facades or operate as stand-alone systems. A photovoltaic (solar) installation can be either connected to the electricity grid (so called grid connected) or stand-alone (off-grid). The former one could allow any excess electricity production to feed the electricity grid and to sell it to the utility company. In Colombia this option (called net metering) is now a reality thanks to the recently enacted Law 1715 of May 2014.

Off-grid or stand alone photovoltaic installations have no connection to an electricity grid, and are contributing to rural electrification in many developing countries. These stand-alone systems have a storage battery for supplying the electric energy when there is no sunlight.

Grid connected installation

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Off-Grid installation

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Key components of a solar installation:

Solar panels / Photovoltaic modules
Which are simply an assembly of solar cells, which in turn are semi-conductor components that convert the solar energy into direct electric current.

Inverter
Responsible for converting the direct electric current produced by the photovoltaic cells into alternating current available for electric devices.
Batteries
Which store the electricity to be used at night when no more sunlight is available. An off-grid photovoltaic system can clearly work without batteries, in which case it provides electricity that can only be consumed immediately for it not to be lost. Moreover, a grid connected installation in Colombia has the ability to sell any production surplus that is not used immediately to the electricity system, creating a virtual credit that can be used at a later moment. As such, the net metering possibility implies that the use of batteries is not needed any longer on grid-connected installations.
Solar charge controller
Regulates the flow of electricity from the photovoltaic panels to the batteries and protects them against overcharge (when the panels are producing energy which is not consumed).

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