When mapping photovoltaic power plants one will sooner or later get in touch with an inverter station as the DC current produced by the PV panels has to be changed into AC current before fed into the power grid. In many cases the inverters are tiny boxes directly attached to the PV-panel blocks:
At the time being I would not map those ones separately (although these are verifyable separate minor objects).
In other cases there are central inverter stations for the whole plant or parts thereof:
which seem well worth mapping to me as they are easily identifiable as separate objects.
The use of power=inverter has significantly risen as from around 2020 when solar plants started to pop up all around the world like mushrooms, with some 7.500 uses at the time being.
I’d say we should have a wiki page for such objects and would not mind to create one, but I am missing the expertise in “power” objects. Should we go for power=inverter or for power=inverter_station? Or both? Which additional tags would make sense? The help of one of the “power” experts having created the relevant wiki pages in the past would be highly appreciated.
It seems to me (a sometimes or even often wiki author) you may have already partially answered yourself: your proposal might include BOTH power=inverter and power=inverter_station for the rather-different sorts of things you show in your included photos. Heck, even as a first draft, such a proposal might even have more such options, to reflect the diversity of such things (small-scale, medium-scale, large-scale is only one dimension of which you might bring into a tagging scheme for these). Including things like voltage (or as a sub-key like :voltage) could be something you sketch out initially or let get filled in over time as others “richen up” the beginnings of your syntax.
Good luck with this: along with the vast number of objects tagged power=line, power=tower and power=pole we’ve already mapped, such photovoltaic infrastructure (and their ilk) seem a worthy set of things to map!
There’s also the intermediate size inverter which is located on the outside wall of your house, usually right beside your external fuse-box e.g. household pv inverter - Google Search.
There’s already substation= and transformer==converter , so inverters at a lower level need to be considered together. It has been pointed out =coverter can be considered as orthogonal, meaning it’s mixing different aspects. Tag:substation=converter - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Worse, there’s =generation and =generator , and wind power has been illustrated (for the purpose of decentralized generation, not about ac vs dc) Tag:substation=generation - OpenStreetMap Wiki =inverter vs =inverter_station would be =transformer vs =substation . Both can be considered, when someone wants to draw each piece of equipment. .
Apparently I did not express myself clear enough - I do not intend to write a proposal because 1. I am short of spare time and 2. I am in lack of the expertise in power related objects.
By the same reason I do not know if it would be better to tag power inverters as power=inverter or substation=inverter or use the value “converter” instead of “inverter”.
What I know is
The devices I am talking about are called “inverter” in real life, see also
Most mappers map them as “inverter” and not as “converter”, usually in connection with a solar power plant.
PV plant inverters often are located in a separate container or building and as such are well worth mapping, be it as power=inverter or substation=inverter or any other tag. As stevea has said
power=inverter has been used come 7.500 times so far. I think this is more than enough to either create a separate wiki page for it or (if inverters should be tagged in any other way) deprecate this tag to avoid further use.
The issue of my topic is nothing but the creation of this wiki page. And as I am in lack of the expertise (as mentioned above) I am looking for one of our electric power experts to help doing so.
Is that so in your place? Around here PV inverters for private roof installations are located inside, usually in the basement or a so called “house utilities room” and as such not visible to the public = no mapping.
I think power=inverter is probably the best option here. They serve a different purpose from a converter substation, so should be tagged differently. I also wouldn’t describe these as a substation, so I’d say we shouldn’t use the substation tag for these.
I’m not entirely sure how useful it is to map these, particularly as the trend in solar is moving towards micro-inverters, but if we settle on a tagging convention I can add these to Open Infrastructure Map.
Given that there are already 7,500 objects in the database I think it would be fine to document this on the wiki as a de facto tag.
I should also clarify what I suggested is already documented, and voted at least for HVDC. Currently, it’s described as “A device to convert power between alternating and direct current electrical power: often, but not only, over high voltage networks”. Tag:power=converter - OpenStreetMap Wiki
In common language, you may not call a solar panel a “generator” either. OSM can be different for generalizing, when =generator is a useful archetype. HVDC ones too can have “inverter” in their names sometimes, as seen in this substation=converterWay: ‪SwePol HVDC Static Inverter Plant‬ (‪255314292‬) | OpenStreetMap
There are 14 transformer=invertertransformer=inverter | Tags | OpenStreetMap Taginfo
In fact, most power=inverter has been mass added. We could ask whoever did that to consider documenting it alongside the project. osm tag history
Sure you can simply document, but it’s unclear why the other tags can’t be used outside HVDC transmission. In comparison, obviously =traction has been used for rectifier substations.
For power=converter , the advantage is there would be there’s no need for another =rectifier
Secondarily as shown in converter= , inverter is only one converter. There’s the older=motor_generator still used for other purposes.
Furthermore, substation= not only has =converter , but also =generation . That seems fine to be used all power generation, including solar.
I have no objection at all to use power=converter also for power inverters, but if we want this to be done then we still should have a wiki page for power=inverter and make clear that this tag is deprecated in favour of power=converter, as I suggested above.
This is a general problem with many of the OSM internal definitions (being different from real world definitions). Mappers are looking for a tag for an object “xyz” (in the given case a power inverter), do not find a match and start tagging what they believe is correct (in the given case power=inverter). That is why I always favour to tag objects with the same terms as used in real life instead of stretching other terms to make them fit anyhow.
So if there is some kind of a consensus to use power=converter for the inverters discussed here I would suggest to write a “deprecated” wiki page for power=inverter.
Ultimately the question is whether we want to tag things based on their underlying technology or their function in the power system. Solar inverters and HVDC converters perform fundamentally different functions in the power system, and they’ll very likely be handled differently by data consumers.
Even ignoring the difference in scale, HVDC converters are always bidirectional, while inverters are always unidirectional.
I agree. Just because the existing tagging isn’t very logical in some places, doesn’t mean we should take that as permission to add more confusing tagging. There’s no penalty to adding a new tag.
I really hate arguing about tagging, and as mentioned before I think this is a fairly niche issue which won’t be applicable to newer solar farms, but that’s my opinion.
It can, however, be applicable to new(er), yes, possibly niche (for now) applications. That’s OK, OSM does accommodate such growth, by keeping an eye on the “growth in the syntax” (tagging, using tools like taginfo) which indicate uptake in such syntax.
“Technology vs. function” is a good place to define a fuzzy boundary. And how / whether / if it might be improved with “sharper” tagging.
I continue to listen…this can continue to go towards a fairly large number of different directions.
We have more “edges” in solar / PV / power than whether these data are entered as giant solar farms vs. more-individual-level PV nodes in the grid. Keep watching, this is a growth realm.
When you are talking about the trend towards micro inverters you mean those little devices directly attached to each single or pairs of panels, correct? If so, this really could make sense as soon as the price for a bunch of these micro converters will note below the price for a conventional converter with the same total in/output.
These tiny elements surely would not need any separate tagging but at the time being the conventional type is “state of the art” and there are still lots of them unmapped for sure.
