Solar panels and inverter-based solutions play an important role in supporting sustainable development energy goals in off-grid communities. Due to the intermittency of solar energy, such solutions typically need to be coupled with energy storage. An affordable, scalable, efficient, and reliable design is needed to grant energy access to remote communities. This paper presents a single-stage, isolated, bi-directional, solar-plus-storage microinverter building block with reduced switch and sensor count. The operation, design, and simulation results are discussed. A 1-kVA/480-Vac hardware prototype has been built and full hardware results will be shown in the final paper.
