Some rural areas in India do not even have a grid and hence, a stand-alone application with energy storage may have to be explored. Moreover, the per watt cost of the existing systems is pretty high. The benefits of the ongoing solar energy revolution are not reaching the masses due to high costs, poor compatibility of India’s grid conditions to work with imported systems, lack of awareness about standards and regulations.

Micro-inverters are low power (200W to 300W range) grid connected or stand-alone inverters having the potential of high efficiency, compactness, high reliability and high economy in terms of meeting energy needs of small installations e.g. homes, small industries, rural applications. Not only are they electrically safer, they also render themselves to modularity, scalability and mass production along with easy fault monitoring. This makes them ideal for low power installations e.g. rural areas, homes, small industries etc. Currently the micro-inverters are available only as grid connected systems with European or American standards and do not conform to the Indian grid conditions. It is proposed to build highly reliable, compact micro-inverters with remote monitoring. These will be suitable for both grid connected and stand-alone applications.