Off-Grid Power for Municipal Water Infrastructure

At a remote McMinnville Water & Light catchment site, I worked on the engineering and integration of a fully off-grid 48 V Victron power system that supports the monitoring and hydraulic controls used to release water to the municipal treatment plant.

The system separates continuous and intermittent loads. A dedicated MultiPlus 2000 supplies monitoring equipment around the clock, while two MultiPlus 5000 units provide split-phase power for the nitrogen accumulation pump and charge the 80 kWh battery system from a generator. The higher-power inverter path is enabled by the existing Allen-Bradley PLC only when hydraulic operation is needed, and Node-RED plus generator-start logic coordinates charging when the generator runs.

Reliability had to be designed into both the physical and control architecture. The battery system uses dual Lynx BMS NG units, solar charging is divided across three independent MPPT and array paths, the array includes module-level rapid shutdown, and the battery equipment is housed in seismically rated enclosures. Those independent paths limit the effect of maintenance or a single charging-path fault while keeping the system understandable and serviceable in a remote location.