Solar Photovoltaic Cables

One of the most important components in your electrical solar photovoltaic plant is wiring and cables, in order to generate reliable electricity.

Solar cables interconnect solar panels and other photovoltaic system component. They are designed to be ultraviolet and weather resistance as they are always laid outside, so single core cables with max DC voltage of 1.8 kv and of temperature rang from 40° c to 90° c are usually used for DC side and three core cables or five core cables are used at AC side in case of single or three phase inverter respectively.

The Question is what solar cable features are, we should care about?

The First feature is the insulation: as the insulation must withstand mechanical and thermal stresses so usually cross linked plastic using electron beam are used as the insulation and jacket materials are resistance to weather conditions and the jacket is always halogen free flame retardant.

The second feature is Dc connection: as we know that we use individual cables (2 cables) to connect modules to form strings and then strings leads to junction box. Here in order to avoid ground fault and short circuit, the positive and negative cables should be laid separately.

The third feature is how to minimize cable losses: this can be done by choosing the right cable cross section area in the condition that losses shouldn't be more that 1 %.Usually we have string cross section area of 4 to 8 square millimeters.

The fourth feature is the standard: meaning that solar cable should be manufactured according to standards like UL4703 standard which applies for solar cable in North America.

One of the most important ways in order to assure that solar cable is good and suitable to various operating condition , you should assure that your cable have  TUV Rheinland Test Certificate which mean that the solar cable specification meet several international standard.

So in order to generate reliable electricity from solar photovoltaic plant you should care about the selection of solar photovoltaic cables and wiring.