Modeling and estimating yield and efficiency of photovoltaic solar parks

Abstract

Abstract—Subsidy reduction and the increased importance of\ud photovoltaic energy generation have triggered the need to develop\ud accurate approaches to measure, estimate and possibly forecast\ud energy production with the goal of enabling early detection and\ud diagnosis of parametric faults before they become catastrophic\ud and lead to partial or full shut down of the plant. Moreover the\ud ability of accurately predicting the energy output of a photovoltaic\ud plant is becoming increasingly important to operate efficiently\ud the existing power grid infrastructure that has difficulties with\ud intermittent, unpredictable power sources. In this paper a new\ud model of photovoltaic solar parks designed to estimate efficiency,\ud predict energy production and enable early fault detection is\ud presented. The proposed model is based on an equivalent electrothermal\ud model of the PhotoVoltaic (PV) cell, which takes as input\ud the irradiance, ambient temperature and wind speed measured by\ud existing sensors and data-logging equipment used in most solar\ud PV parks. The proposed model is demonstrated to accurately\ud predict the performance of real-life MW scale plants. By directly\ud comparing predicted vs. actual energy production, it also allows\ud easy and early identification and diagnose of malfunctions and\ud efficiency drops of PV systems

Modelling of Photovoltaic Systems for Real-Time Hardware Simulation

“…The idea is that the photovoltaic system and the rest of the system are executed in parallel in real time and the maximum power is monitored for irradiation variation in the real world and the extracted power is supplied to the DC bus to which storage element and the fixed load resistance are connected. The modeling of these systems are done in Simulink [9]. The modeled systems are compiled and deployed in NI myRIO's FPGA [10] for realtime simulation.…”

“…The mathematical model will be simulated in myRIO in real-time. FPGA IO's are used to The model will be implemented in MATLAB-Simulink [9] and translated in into C code with its internal C code generating tool using the NI VeriStand compilers which adds on to the MATLAB and it can generate the file ".SO" which defines our model with the libraries. NI VeriStand Engine has to be deployed in the RT target to make it compatible to run with the host computer.…”

Faults modeling of the impedance and reversed polarity types within the PV generator operation

“…Photovoltaic generator during its functioning submits to a set of defects, which they decrease its productivity, such as the cells heating, cells crack, degradation and corrosion of the interconnections [3][4][5]. These defects participate in the appearance of the impedance and the reversed polarity faults, which reduce the power supplies by the faulty generator [6][7].…”

Monitoring performance and efficiency of photovoltaic parks

“…In this paper we present a completely different approach to implement a large, industrial-strength PV parks monitoring system leveraging on the simulation model of PV parks described in Refs. [13,14]. The electrical and thermal equations governing the behaviour of panels and the resistance of interconnecting cables derived from the layout of the actual PV park are considered, thus leading to a compact and numerically efficient model that is capable to account for the interdependency of the thermal and electrical equations.…”