Day In The Life: Electrical Engineer

i'm george i'm an electrical engineer i work for unesco as a high voltage point person and technician on solar farms and battery energy storage what we're going to do today is replacing a faulty inverter that involves isolating the ac circuit isolating the dc side and luke would be here with me today to manual handle the the inventor and i'll just be on the side just in case anything and anything happens hopefully not i shouldn't have said that what got me into electrical engineer is the interest for science i love science i love physics in particular with renewable energy it's it's really fascinating so the way the solar panels work is we we have a silicon wafer they composed of two layers one of the silicon plates it's got a missing electron and the top one has got an excess of electrons so when the sun hits one of the electrons when the photons hits the electrons they shift to the underneath layer and this causes a voltage potential each cell generates about half a volt and then you put them in series particularly on this side we have 1200 volts across the strings dc current and then with the help of inverters we convert from dc to ac so what i'll be doing now i'll be uh proving the ac circuit is dead i need to find out where this is fed from uh the combiner box would be sub collector would be uh on the next row i need to go around it proper circuited and then uh yeah take take the old inventor off and install a new embedder okay that is safe to work on so we've we've proven the circuit is uh it's dead and we can uh we can work on we've got our safe isolation point at the feeder pillar and we can uh start taking off the old inverter uh right so i'm gonna open uh open the evaporator to access the ac connections uh they're gonna be in here uh underneath and then uh uh click on the uh string boxes that's gonna release the inverter to be removed and and the new one can uh can go back back in place here's our ac connections as a safety precaution as well up we could test it again just to prove it yep that's perfectly fine to be worked on so some of the problems of the wildlife causing on solar farms would be likely mices building nests in cavities researching on insulation causing a fault path to the ground to the frame which is uh which is earth and rabbits as well we have analysts which are constantly monitoring the portal so they analyze each inverter house as performing if it's something out of order is underperforming compared to other invaders and that's being picked up we also have pyranometers which are precise instruments for measuring how much sunlight you have if you know how much sunlight you have you know how many solar panels you have and then you can calculate how much energy you expected from the safety perspective what do we actually wear on site we have different so we have a five layers of protection depending on what we actually do on site for walking around and arc flash rated gear is necessary as a minimum it's a really comfortable uh gear as soon as you start work you're feeling great doing your work so you enjoy it more better and then as we move up to different tasks as as the risk increases then we layer up for better protection the difference between working with dc compared to a ac current is we've got high voltages as you'd normally have on ac circuits and also the arc flash potential is is a lot higher and the arcs are sustained for much longer period of time because the dc current it just have the high potential and the low potential whereas the ac crosses every 50 times a second crosses as the sine wave goes crosses through the zero volt so this is a torque wrench it's uh it's used to torque connections to a certain amount of torque so you don't over tighten them or under tighten them uh question we uh i'm being often asked does the sun need to shine on the funnels to have generation the answer is no absolutely not as long as you have dye light as long as you can see outside then that that is enough it's obviously not going to generate as much as uh in a full sunshine but on a really cloudy day you would get about 40 percent of of generation overrated capacity of a plant what i enjoy most about my job is working in a in the field working outside enjoying the wildlife and the decarbonization of energy generation you

Channel: STRATA® Protection

Views: 24,759

Keywords: Engineeredforengineers, strataprotection, electricalengineer, ppe, arcflashclothing, Frprotection, ARC, anti-static, flameretardant, energy, renewable, solarfarm, solar, carbonfree, carbonzero

Id: Vf9wiCl59AM

Length: 5min 46sec (346 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022