Voltsys has been designing and manufacturing turbine controllers since 2008. We use remote desktop to provide online support to customers worldwide, including UK, Mainland Europe, USA, Korea, Australia and New Zealand. We have an excellent reputation for tech support and for our expertise in system design.

In recent times, mainstream manufacturers have ceased production of wind inverters and controllers, most notably SMA Windy Boy and Power One / Aurora / ABB.

We have worked closely with ABB and have modified our controllers so they override the MPPT tracking in solar inverters. Our controller stores the wind turbine power curve and manages the inverter. Using this system, we continue to supply controllers and inverters for small wind and micro hydro systems.

For hydro turbines, our “hydro optimised” firmware is similar to MPPT tracking for solar, but designed to work much more slowly in a manner suitable for hydro to keep it optimised regardless of flow.

Effectively, our controllers enable you to have fully functional wind and hydro inverters using the ABB solar product range from 1.2kw up to 120kw. Our systems can also be used in off-grid applications.

If you require bespoke controller design, including small form factor and micro hydro controllers, we can provide consultancy and one-off design depending on your requirements.

What do controllers do?

For small scale wind and hydro systems, controllers provide a selection of the following functions;

• Rectifiers to convert wild 3 phase AC voltage from the turbine into DC
• Smoothing capacitors for the DC voltage
• Dump load functionality – usually an IGBT switched DC dump load to prevent over-speed or over-voltage
• Optional Functions on most Voltsys controllers include;
• Data logging to facilitate fault finding in the case of breakdown
• Manage power curve and instruct the inverter how much power to harvest
• Measure and data log wind speed
• Other relay functions, e.g. for pitch or yaw shutdown of the turbine