To meet the increase in peak electricity demand and to reduce fossil fuel emissions in Oman and as an initiative taken by the government, by 2030, 15% (3000 MW) of the total energy mix (20,000 MW) should be generated from renewable energy resources like Solar and wind etc. It is crucial for the stakeholders and PV enthusiast to predict the return on investments and its performance in the local climatic conditions. In this paper, a case study has been presented where PV modules of different technologies, age and installed in different climatic conditions of Oman are studied. The results showed that the output power degradation for all modules is around 1.96%/year which is almost double compare to the European countries. Electrical analysis of different PV technologies showed that multi-crystalline silicon technology installed in hot and dry climate is degrading (around 2.54%/year) faster, while thin-film technology (CdTe) has shown lowest degradation (average of 0.8%/year) compare to any other PV technology. Furthermore, IR image analysis showed that presence of hot cells in PV modules are also a significant contributing factor in PV degradation rates. Severity of interconnect breakage (SIB) tests confirms the increase of the series-resistance of PV modules which is also a significant contributing factor for reduction in short-circuit current and thus PV maximum output power.
With the wide acceptance of modeling a PV cell by a single diode, a series and parallel resistors; many researchers have discussed different mathematical forms and iterative techniques to extract the values of these model elements depending on the key parameters provided by the manufacturer datasheet. This paper avoids iterative techniques and obtains the values of the five parameters of the one diode model by developing closed form expressions. The maximum error produced by this technique is 10% when compared to the exact values of the one diode model circuit built by Spice. The 10% maximum error has occurred during the estimation of the reverse saturation current (Io) of the diode, nevertheless, it should be mentioned that even for this same parameter the model outperforms many iterative dependent works. Furthermore, this paper discusses the effect of temperature on the operation performance of PV cells. In particular, the temperature effect on the open circuit voltage, the short circuit current, the fill factor, the reverse saturation current, and the conversion efficiency was modeled and evaluated for different brand technologies
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