Victron Energy’s blog has featured our Olane Community Microgrid, published on the official Victron Energy blog on 24 July 2018 — a follow-up to their earlier post on our Simigoan project, which they credited with “top honours for the most challenging of Victron Energy equipped installations.”
Olane is a remote community of around 65 families in the eastern mountains of Nepal, with no connection to the national utility grid. From April 2018, the village has run on a solar-based microgrid, distributing power to every household over 4 kilometres of overhead line carried on 120 newly erected poles. As the Victron post notes, this time the team at least had four-wheel-drive assistance for part of the equipment delivery — an improvement on hand-carrying inverters up a mountain, as they’d done for Simigoan.
The system is built around 6 Victron Energy Quattro 8 kVA inverters stacked to provide 39 kW of nominal capacity, paired with 6 Victron MPPT solar charge controllers delivering 510A of charging from 81 Trina Solar 315W modules — around 25 kW of generation. Storage comes from 4,000 Ah of 2V industrial VRLA batteries, with a Victron Color Control GX handling system monitoring, 3G internet connectivity, and switchboards designed and built in-house by Peak Power. Residents now have clean, reliable power day and night for lighting, cooking, communications, education, water pumping and treatment, and healthcare and medicine storage, billed through smart meters at each service entrance.
The post closes with thanks to Rakesh Shrestha and Joel Basham of Peak Power for the images and information behind the write-up — recognition of what, at the time, was one of the more logistically demanding installations in Victron’s global network.
You can read the full Victron Energy blog post here, or see the technical write-up and photos on our Olane Microgrid project page.