Solar Power Australia is proud to have been a part of the “Panasonic Eclipse Live by Solar Power” event held at Port Douglas in November 2012.
Panasonic Japan commissioned Solar Power Australia to design and construct a portable solar power system to charge the Lithium battery packs to run all the camera and computer equipment required to film the total eclipse of the sun in Cairns and Port Doulas in QLD Australia. The equipment was also to be used to broadcast the live footage of the eclipse to hundreds of thousands of viewers around the globe.
Through the success of this project, Panasonic (powered by SPA) were able to capture some of the best footage of this spectacular event which was broadcast nationally on Australia’s Channel’s 7 and 9, as well as globally through the internet.
The most practical method to make a relatively large solar power system portable is to build it on a trailer. As the project required a considerable amount of energy production, even using the high efficiency Panasonic 235W HIT solar modules, the necessary number of modules would require a very large trailer. As such, we designed a system where the electronic components were housed in the payload area of a box trailer and the solar modules were attached to the side of the trailer and deployed on the ground.
The Panasonic Eclipse Solar Trailer system incorporated a 2.115kW solar array consisting of 9 x Panasonic 235W HIT solar modules. Boosting and regulation of the charge current was performed by a Midnite Classic 250 MPPT solar controller which fed the current to the 48V 216Ah Geltech storage battery bank. An Outback Power Systems VFX3048 Inverter Charger provided 230VAC power to run various equipment, while large DC-DC Converters provided power to charge the Lithium battery packs.
Please contact Solar Power Australia for more details or to provide us with your solar trailer requirements.
