Title
Estimation of the effective nominal power of a photovoltaic generator under non-ideal operating conditions
Date Issued
01 January 2022
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Publisher(s)
Elsevier Ltd
Abstract
The nominal power is an essential parameter for evaluating the general state of a photovoltaic plant. The American Society for Testing and Materials, the International Electrotechnical Commission and other works propose procedures that allow estimating the nominal power of a photovoltaic generator in outdoor conditions. These procedures generally require monitoring days with ideal conditions, particularly clear sky days with high irradiance values and low wind speeds. These restrictions can limit the available number of monitoring days, especially in places with frequent cloud formations. In this work, a 109.44 kW photovoltaic plant was monitored for six months in Granada, Spain. Its nominal power is first estimated applying a referential procedure reported in the literature for large PV plants under the required ideal climatic conditions. In order to overcome the restrictions for estimating the nominal power, we propose a new procedure applicable not only for ideal but also for non-ideal conditions, such as found on partially cloudy days. This new procedure applies non-parametric statistics to find the most probable value of the nominal power within a single monitoring day. A statistical analysis indicates that it reliably estimates the nominal power at non-ideal conditions while preserving the same estimation accuracy as under ideal conditions.
Start page
784
End page
792
Volume
231
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ingeniería ambiental y geológica
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85121435281
Source
Solar Energy
ISSN of the container
0038092X
Sponsor(s)
The authors thank Vlada Pleshcheva for her valuable comments on statistical analysis. This work received financial support by the Concytec – World Bank project “Mejoramiento y Ampliación de los Servicios del Sistema Nacional de Ciencia Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica” 8682-PE, through its executing unit PROCIENCIA, contract N°045-2018-FONDECYT-BM-IADT-MU. José Angulo acknowledges the financial support given by Concytec under the Ph.D. scholarship program with contract N°236-2015-FONDECYT. The PUCP vicechancellorship for research also provided under the contract no. CAP-2021-A-0028/PI0737. Additionally, part of this work has been financed by the “Agencia Andaluza de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo” of the Junta de Andalucía (Andalusian Autonomous Government), through the project “Emergiendo con el Sol” under expedient code 2012DEC026. Finally, the authors are grateful to the company GERION INGENIERIA for giving access to the facilities and permission for monitoring the PV plant.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus