Abstract
High concentrating photovoltaic (HCPV) is a promising technique for the practical commercial utilization of solar energy. However, the performance of a HCPV system is significantly influenced by environmental parameters such as solar direct normal irradiance (DNI) level and environmental temperature. This paper analyzes the performance of a 9 kWp grid-connected HCPV system in Kunming (Yunnan, China), during practical field operations over an entire year, and discusses how the environmental parameters influence the performance from both the energy conversion and power inversion perspective. Large variations in the performance of the HCPV system have been observed for different months, due to the respective changes in the environmental parameters. The DNI level has been found to be a dominant parameter that mainly determines the amount of energy production as well as the performance ratio of the HCPV system. The environmental temperature and wind velocity have less influence on the system performance ratio than expected. Based on the performance of the present HCPV system, a quantified correlation between the output power and the direct normal irradiance has been derived, which provides guidelines for both the cogent application and the modeling of HCPV techniques for grid-connected power generation.
Highlights
Due to the fast development in industry and the growing population, the past 50 years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the consumption and cost of the fossil fuels remaining in limited amounts in the Earth’s crust
The instantaneous inverter efficiency has been calculated as ηinv = PAC/PDC × 100% [27]
The spatial distribution of direct normal irradiance (DNI) is associated with parameters such as air mass (AM), aerosol optical depth (AOD) and precipitable water (PW), since they influence the scattering of the incident sunlight with a specific wavelength [17]
Summary
Due to the fast development in industry and the growing population, the past 50 years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the consumption and cost of the fossil fuels remaining in limited amounts in the Earth’s crust. In HCPV techniques, the sunlight is focused by optical concentrating devices (often Fresnel lenses for high concentrating) onto solar cell chips with much smaller area [5,6]. This effectively reduces the usage of the expensive solar cells and reduces the total cost. The high performance solar cells used for HCPV possess a multi-junction structure, where each junction possesses a distinguished band-gap It can more effectively absorb the sunlight with different wavelengths and realize a high conversion efficiency of more than 45% [7]
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