SageBrush said:
You have me wondering now if my grounding will pass inspection. The install is for a ground mount PV installation:
OK, I read through your description and some details are either absent or I missed them. If you want to describe your installation, a diagram would be easiest. Show each box and conduit labeled with size and type, the location and size of the inverters, the sizes and materials of the wires, and the breaker sizes and locations, on a one-line diagram.
But a couple general comments: Grounding is an overloaded term and refers to both bonding and earthing. Of those bonding is more important (critical).
You have a feeder running from the house (?) to your ground mount array. That feeder needs to have a bonding conductor, called an EGC. The EGC can be the metallic conduit itself, or it can be a wire type EGC inside the conduit. There's no allowance for running an EGC outside metal conduit. Whether or not you have a wire type EGC inside the conduit, any non-metallic box with more than one metal conduit section terminated at it should have those metal conduits bonded together with e.g. bonding bushings and a bonding jumper between them. The size of the bonding jumpers, and of a wire type EGC if present, depends on the size of the circuit breaker on the grid end of the feeder. If you have a wire type EGC and the ungrounded conductors are larger than the minimum size, then the wire type EGC also needs to be increased in size.
So if your feeder is AC (the inverters are at the ground mount), then that EGC runs all the way to the inverters and is connected to their cases and the bonding conductors going to the panels. If your feeder is DC (the inverters are at the house), then I'd need to research how you size a wire type EGC that accompanies them.
The bonding conductor has a single connection to the neutral service conductor at the service panel, and in all other places is kept separate from the neutral conductor (unless you have isolation transformers in your electrical system).
In addition to bonding, there's earthing, which is connecting a conductor to earth. At the service entrance, you earth the neutral service conductor by connecting it to some earthing electrodes (a GES, or grounding electrode system). The connecting conductor is called a GEC. At a separate structure, you re-earth the EGC (not the neutral) by connecting it to a local GES, via a local GEC. Any GEC that is within metal conduit needs to be bonded to the metal conduit at both ends of each conductively continuous section of metal conduit, to reduce the choke effect on the high frequency components of lightning strikes. And a conductor may be both an EGC and a GEC simultaneously, if it meets all the requirements of both.
The upshot is that your ground rods along the path of your conduit, and your bare conductor outside the conduit, would be a GES and GEC, respectively. They can get connected to the EGC in your feeder at the ground mount structure panel (assuming an AC feeder with inverters on the array). You are allowed to connect them to your EGC along the conduit run. But the GES and GEC are of secondary importance to the EGC, and they do not replace an EGC. In particular, if you removed the GES and GEC, you must still have an EGC in the feeder that connects the electrical equipment cases on the ground mount array back to the service.
Hope this helps.
Cheers, Wayne