Day 1

I am spending this week interning at the NextEra Energy Technical Services Lab in West Palm Beach. I figured I would post after each day on my blog to share what we did and, importantly, what I learned. They have arranged so that each day we will work with a different team and learn about their contributions to the larger field. Next week I am also interning with a different part of NextEra Energy and will continue to share my big takeaways. That will mainly take place and their main campus in Juno Beach, FL. Today we worked with the Innovation Team, consisting of primarily mechanical and electrical engineers. They create and help repair much of the necessary circuit boards in solar sites. If there is an issue with a part in the solar site (or other NextEra facilities), the Innovation Team determines if it will be more beneficial to repair the broken part or may a new one. In the event they make a new part, they sometimes have to reverse engineer the piece in order to make a replica. They use Autocad, Solidworks, Altium, Express PCB, and Express Schematic softwares to help design and engineer various circuit boards and necessary components. We also toured their on site solar plant that produces 5 MW of electricity, enough to power 1,000 houses. In order to create electricity from the sun, the energy needs to be converted from DC (direct current) power to AC (alternating current) power using an inverter.

AC/DC Power

This conversion and the production of inverters is the primary idea we learned about today. These devices play a critical role by converting the DC electricity produced by solar panels from sunlight into AC electricity that can power household appliances and be fed into the electrical grid. Inverters do this by using electronic switches to rapidly reverse the direction of the DC current, creating pulses that alternate in polarity. These pulses are then shaped into a smooth AC waveform using filters or techniques like pulse-width modulation. The longer the duration, the wider the cross section will be. Some inverters also adjust the voltage to match the requirements of household devices or the power grid. Without inverters, solar energy would not be usable in most everyday applications. While DC is what solar panels generate, AC is what most appliances and systems are designed to use. Inverters bridge that gap, acting as essential translators between the clean energy we harvest and the energy the world requires. Without inverters, the energy collected by solar panels would remain trapped in a form that’s incompatible with everyday use, making the AC/DC conversion process fundamental to unlocking the true potential of solar power.