Abstract
This paper presents a reliable mathematical method to predict the energy generation from grid connected photovoltaic plant of different commercially used technologies in different zones of India. Global horizontal insolation (GHI) and daytime temperature are the two major parameters affecting the output of photovoltaic (PV) plant. Depending on those two major parameters, India is classified into 15 climatic zones. Typical Meteorological Year data were collected from National Renewable Energy Laboratory to classify India in different climatic zones. Energy generation of different commercially used PV technologies in different climatic zones of India is predicted using proposed mathematical method. These results show a decisive study to choose the best PV technology for different climatic zones of India. Results predict that in almost all climatic zones, amorphous silicon (a-Si) is the best suitable PV technology. In very low-temperature zones, irrespective of GHI, the second best suitable PV technology is mono and cadmium telluride (CdTe) as generation from these two technologies is same. Whereas in other climatic zones, after a-Si the best suitable is CdTe PV technology. Predicted energy generation is validated with the 1-year generation of 2014 from 15 working PV plants of different technologies. Predicted generation is in good co-relation with the actual real-time generation from the PV plants.
Highlights
Interest in forecasting the energy production of PV power plants has increased in recent years from the concern about climate change [1]
(1) Classification of India in different climatic zones considering on Global horizontal insolation (GHI) and day-time temperature
To know the energy output from different photovoltaic technologies in different zones of India, first step is to classify India in different climatic zones on the basis of annual average GHI and day-time temperature, the major two factors affecting the output of PV technology
Summary
Interest in forecasting the energy production of PV power plants has increased in recent years from the concern about climate change [1]. Rough estimation of the average energy produced by the PV power plants can be provided through estimation of global irradiance. Since number of research work is available on forecasting solar irradiance [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Prediction of global irradiance can be applied to forecast the energy production of PV power plant. The environmental factors influencing the performance of PV module are analyzed in the literature [11,12,13,14]. The effect of temperature on the performance of PV modules is analyzed in [15,16,17]. Considerably lesser number of literature is present in predicting the actual output of PV power plant
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