Performance Assessment of a Laboratory Rooftop PV Plant in Karaj-Iran

Photovoltaic (PV) plants are considered as the source for renewable electricity generation in Iran with the highest potential. Besides the technical and economical assessments prior to the plants’ establishments, their performances need to be evaluated in terms of electricity generation afterwards. This is due to the fact that the plant’s performance may degrade over the time and a repair or replacement may be needed. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of a PV plant established on the rooftop of a building, laboratory located in Karaj-Iran. Experimental tests were performed on the strings individually as well as the PV array in the winter during completely sunny and clean days. In such case, we achieved an ۸۵% of the plant’s nominal power. Moreover, we developed a model for the plant which is able to predict the plant’s performance in any weather conditions based on the built-in PV array model in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The model’s predictions are shown against the tests data for the environmental conditions involved during the tests and a close agreement is achieved. In this way, as the novelty of this paper, by assuming the ۲۰oC maximum ambient temperature as the cell temperature, an estimation of the effective sun irradiance is obtained. The tests belong to the latitude of ۳۵.۷۴۸۲۱۶۴° and the longitude of ۵۰.۹۵۷۸۲۶۰°.

کلیدواژه ها:

Photovoltaic Plant ، Performance Assessment ، Model development ، Maximum power point tracking ، Effective sun irradiance estimation