Online monitoring of roof-mounted stand-alone solar photovoltaic system on residential building

Abstract

Abstract Advancement in solar photovoltaic (SPV) system technologies over past decades has resulted in regular decrease in prices of the systems world-over. The number of installations is projected to increase manifolds due to proactive Government policies and support for market development. There is need to study performance of already installed systems and establish benchmarks of expected performance in a given region. The benchmarks will be useful for performance contractors as well as users of the systems. Also, there is growing need to create awareness among stakeholders about scope for enhancing performance of the system through effective operation and maintenance of the systems. In the present work, we analyze performance of recently installed roof-mounted stand-alone solar photovoltaic system on a residential building, that is equipped with internet based online performance monitoring platform. This is the first of its kind of work in the region, reporting results of monitoring of performance of a remotely located system, over a period of one full year in the state of Goa, India. The data has been acquired at regular intervals of ten minutes for one year using the platform for online performance monitoring. The results confirm that the online performance monitoring platform is a potentially advantageous feature of the system for both system integrators as well as system operators or users. The results provide useful basis for comparison of performance in terms of performance ratio and energy yield of the system. The results are also useful for predicting performance and maximizing capacity utilization of the system.