Abstract
Solar plants suffer of partial shading and mismatch problems. Without considering the generation of hot spots and the resulting security issues, a monitoring system for the health of a PV plant should be useful to drive a dynamic reconfiguration system (DRS) to solve bottlenecks due to different panels’ shading. Over the years different DRS architectures have been proposed, but no suggestions about costs and benefits have been provided. Starting from technical subjects such as differences of the topologies driving the hardware complexity and number of components, this paper identifies the cost of DRS and its lifetime, and based on these issues it provides an economic analysis for a 6 kWp PV plant in different European Union countries, in which the dissimilar incentive policies have been considered.
Highlights
The trend of the last decade to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize the energy sources is mainly due to the increase of the temperature of the planet, has driven the development and improvement of technologies for renewable energy sources
The net present value (NPV) allows to evaluate the economic convenience of an investment for a specific period from a sum of cash flows actualized at time zero
Only residential PV systems with 6 kWp of power have been taken into account. This choice is motivated by the fact that the use of dynamic reconfiguration systems (DRS) is very interesting in residential PV plants, where the probability of installation of a fixed obstacle is high in respect to other type of plants
Summary
The trend of the last decade to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize the energy sources is mainly due to the increase of the temperature of the planet, has driven the development and improvement of technologies for renewable energy sources. A typical issue of PV plants is the power loss due to the differences of irradiation (partial shading or wrong design) among the cells of the same module or among different modules of an array This phenomenon, known as mismatch, can generate a considerable power loss of the total system with a consequent economic loss. In [20] a technical-economical evaluation on the use of a DRS in some EU countries for PV plants is reported. The study takes into account different technical and economic aspects of a PV plant in order to present a complete economic analysis. The study is focused on the use of different DRS configurations reported in literature, in some EU countries in order to evaluate the performances of the investment.
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