SOLAR 1.1: DEVELOPMENT OF SOFTWARE FOR SELECTING COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE PHOTOVOLTAIC PANELS, INCLUDING THE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Photovoltaic energy represents an opportunity to produce electricity in a clean manner. It can be applied in all world places, in particular in the developing countries, where there are places where electricity grids are unreliable or non-existent and is inconvenient to make investments in a grids expansion. In remote locations photovoltaic power supplies often the most economic and cleaner option to produce electric energy. In addition, many developing countries have high radiation levels year round because of their latitude. The software SOLAR 1.1 was developed with purpose of helping the choice of photovoltaic panels available commercially including electric needs calculation for the installation. This new version of program also help to conduce the economic analysis for grid connected or stand alone photovoltaic systems for the choice of convenient values of interest rate and payback period. In this version of the software is possible to select the language among English, Italian and Portuguese. The software choices the panels in its archive that contains more of 250 types of photovoltaic modules made by 35 producers. The selection provides as output three modules, the cheapest for each cell type: monocrystalline, multicrystalline and amorphous. The software archive can be updated adding new item or editing the inserted items. The economic analysis can be operated by SOLAR 1.1 in each of the chosen panels. This analysis gives as output all the values of the costs in the photovoltaic system and the diagrams with the electricity cost and the expected annual saving trend with variation of the amortisation period and for different values of the interest rate and the governmental subsidy rate.