Thermodynamic investigations on 227 kWp industrial rooftop power plant

Abstract

With the growing demand of energy along with scarcity of natural resources and drastic fluctuations of the climate change implications, there has been a constant effort of mankind to switch towards renewable energy sources. Among various renewable energy systems, solar photovoltaics (SPV) has emerged out as an evident choice for the range of applications from commercial to residential end users. The performance of the SPV power system needs to be monitored, so that the plant can be operated efficiently and maximum electrical output can be generated out of it. For performance assessment, capacity utilisation factor (CUF) has been considered the parameter for monitoring of the SPV power plant. CUF is monitored for the industrial roof top SPV power plant and compared with the other CUF data available in the literature. In the present work, an effort has been made to monitor the CUF parameters, performance ratio (PR) and energy generation units for a 227kWp SPV industrial rooftop power plant. It has been found that due to certain losses, the CUF is found to be lower than the ability of the system. The various technical causes of low CUF along with their remedial actions are proposed in view of improving CUF and overall efficiency of the system.

Keywords

• Industrial roof top solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant
• CUF
• Performance ratio (PR)
• Array yield

References

1. The article references can be accessed from the .pdf file.