Inframax Holdings, a national property group with head office in Cape Town, contracted AWPower to design and install a 156kWp solar PV system for their Kenridge Shopping Centre in Cape Town. Since being commissioned, the electricity generated through winter and arrival of summer supports an interesting business case that savings can pay for solar PV, and even more so when the system is configured to allow feed-in to the grid (energy export).

The solar PV system installed at Kenridge Centre is a Grid-Tied PV System configured to generate electricity for self-consumption, with excess generated electricity being exported back into the electricity grid.

Being grid-tied, this system does not produce energy during load-shedding periods, but is able to when extended through a battery-tied system that provides power to essential loads or an appropriately sized generator.

Kenridge Centre inverters

The equipment includes 5x27.6kVA 3-phase SolarEdge inverters connected to 155.8kWp (380 x 410Wp) PV modules. SolarEdge equipment has a warranty of 25 years for power optimisers and 12 years for inverters, with the Canadian Solar Panels having a 12-year product warranty.

For this installation and any commercial solar PV installations, the clients stay on their current tariff and are allowed to export excess energy back into the grid and receive credit at City of Cape Town’s applicable tariff rate. AWPower engineers assisted with registration and obtaining a commissioning approval letter from City of Cape Town and the system was allowed to generate and export to the grid from August 2020.

Solar PV performance dashboards

Information obtained from the SolarEdge Monitoring Portal dashboards provides interesting generation statistics; the graphs below indicate a good mid-October week day with office/commercial consumption and also a graph showing a typical weekend day with low consumption and increased export to the grid.

Graph 1: Indicating a good week day (21 October 2020)

Graph 2: Indicating typical weekend day (23 October 2020)

Using average statistics for October, week days and weekend days, the following was calculated:

Commented Kiarin Naidoo, Projects Manager for Inframax Holdings: “I am really happy with AWPower’s installation. I had no doubts that this would be one of my favourite and most interesting projects.

Kiarin Naidoo

"From my first meeting with the team at AWPower, I was impressed by their knowledge and expertise. Their engineers were always on hand and patient in answering any questions I threw at them and I still maintain a great working relationship with their team.

"After being delayed by the national lockdown, I was particularly impressed with the short timeframe from the installation start date to project completion. Throughout this process, AWPower’s workmanship and professionalism was exemplary.

"So far, the system is running as we were told it would, if not better, and I look forward to working with AWPower on future projects. I would highly recommend them to any prospective client.”

See also more about the tax incentives https://www.awpower.co.za/solar-pv-for-business-finance-tax-breaks/