Every hour the sun beams onto the Earth creating enough global energy to satisfy our needs for a whole year.  So how can we harness this energy? Solar energy is the technology that we use to harness the sun’s energy, turning it into usable electricity. Solar energy is becoming a more popular source of renewable energy, not only in a domestic sense, but also in a commercial sense. Solar thermal plants are popping up around the world as renewable energy sources are used to power commercial applications.

Low-power solenoid valves for solar power

ASCO’s low-power solenoid valves are an optimal solution for applications powered by renewable energy sources, such as solar panels. This article describes how ASCO’s 3-way lower power solenoid valves were installed in a remote natural gas wellhead application, powered by solar energy.

The customer’s challenge was to reduce the wattage of the solenoid valves used to control process valves at remote wellhead sites in natural gas fields. From the customers perspective, the lower the wattage the better. The customer was previously using valves with a 1.8 wattage, which resulted in quite high energy costs.

The solution to this problem came in the form of ASCO’s 8316, 8314, Mag Latch and 8317 Series low power 3-way solenoid valves.

The ASCO low-power solenoid valves series offer 0.55 watt power consumption, whilst providing highly reliable operating performance, thus making it an optimal solution for applications powered by renewable energy sources. By changing to 0.5 watt low-power solenoid valves, the customer was able to save on the size of Solar Panels required and could also reduce the number of batteries required. This saving meant that the customer had the option to add more controls in the future and enhance the efficiency of the application.

327 series low power solenoid valve

ASCO state that there is not another valve on the market that delivers such high performance per watt. Their highly flexible valve comes in multiple options for flow efficiency and maximum and minimum temperature and pressure ratings. It has ATEX, FM, CSA, and UL approvals and is also SIL-3 certified.

ASCO have combined their renowned reliability and availability, with the industry’s lowest power consumption levels to offer an exceptional flow control solution that can accommodate virtually any low-power application.

With the increased awareness and the importance of harnessing renewable energy sources to power our applications, companies may be relying more on partners like ASCO to help deliver products such as this to their applications.