Solar Photovoltaic Tree: Urban PV power plants to increase power to land occupancy ratio

Abstract

With the day-by-day modernization, increasing electricity demand, and the restriction of climate change, more pressure is to search the renewable energy sources (Solar, Wind, etc.) and draw maximum power from them as it increases the need to develop Smart Cities, which have heavy electricity demand. For renewable energy power plant installations, one of the major difficulties is availability of land, as power plants like Solar photovoltaics have higher demand of open land, which is scarce in urban landscapes. In context of the problem statement of generating same electric power using less land, new models of Solar Photovoltaic Trees have been proposed, which can be used instead of conventional Solar PV plants. Simulations have been done on different SPV Tree models, concluding that very less land area is required to generate the same amount of electric power in comparison to conventional SPV plants, for example if a conventional ground – mounted model requires 300 m2 area, but one of our proposed models; Daisy SPV Tree requires only about 13 m2 area for generating the same electric power. Out of the total land area, other available space can be utilized for various purposes, which can be a solution for switching to renewables and can become very useful in urban landscapes. The possible designs are studied to get optimum “Power-to-Land occupancy Ratio” and “Land Coverage Ratio” with no additional power loss as compared to conventional ground-mounted Solar PV power plant and generate same amount of power using very marginal amount of land.