Design and development of wireless networking for solar PV panel cleaning robots

A newly constructed 10MW solar photovoltaic power plant in Qinghai province China is examined for the latest cost benefits evaluation in this research, the RETScreen analysis software tool is used for the energy production estimation, financial feasibility analysis and environmental benefit analysis. Initial results show high solar PV potential in Qinghai province China, 20GWh power electricity generation can reduce more than 18,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually. Although current LCOE of PV power is still double than fossil fuel electricity, but the investment of solar PV is motivated by governmental subsidy policy, the payback of the solar PV project became attractive under the new market environment, the IRR could reach more than 20%, with further material cost decrease, efficiency improvement and continues subsidy policy, the solar PV power will be a trend of renewable energy in China. The GHG emissions reduction is another driving reason to encourage solar PV power development in China.

<span>Malaysia is rapidly expanding the generation capacity of solar power through large scale solar (LSS) projects with the aim to achieve 20% renewable energy mix by 2025. This has motivated many solar industry players to explore the usage of solar PV with single axis tracker (SAT) system. However, many are still hesitant due to the lack of understanding on the comparative performance between fixed mounted solar PV with solar PV with SAT system. This paper aims to provide a comparative analysis on the performance of both systems. Simulation using PVSyst 6.83 was performed in five potential LSS sites spread across Peninsular Malaysia in Perlis, Kelantan, Pahang, Selangor and Johor with the same installed capacity of 10.32MWp. The energy yield and capacity factor for 21 years were simulated. On the average, it was found that SAT outperforms fixed mounted solar PV system by 15.08% based on their performance on their first year operation. </span>

This paper introduces the simulation and analysis of a three-phase large-scale grid-connected solar Photovoltaic (PV) system in order to assess the effect of integrated PV grid-connected mode on the power quality of the utility grid. The study takes into account the effect of solar system power variation as well as the PV inverter's introduction of penetrating harmonics into the system. The simulation of the system is done in MATLAB software using the SIMULINK environment and is tested by the Pysyst program. Where it is done in real-time with an actual case study on a 1620-kW PV array connected to an 11-kV grid via a three-level Voltage Source Converter (VSC). The technical data was recorded, and the system's power quality was examined. The grid-connected PV system's Performance Ratio (PR) is assessed to determine the PV system's reliability and grid connectivity.

A novel on-time partial shading detection technique for electrical reconfiguration in solar PV system

Due to the increasingly evident climate change and the recent energy crisis triggered by regional conflicts, the exploitation of renewable energy has become one of the pressing tasks today. In light of this background, today the photovoltaic (PV) market is booming globally. This makes the management and maintenance of solar PV panels a new area of business, as neglecting it may not only lead to significant financial losses but also the failure to combat climate change and the energy crisis. In fact, in the long service life of solar panels, they do face many risks that may degrade their power generation performance, damage their structures, or even cause the complete loss of their power generation capacity. It is hoped that these problems can be found and resolved as soon as possible. However, in reality, this is a challenging task as a large solar power plant may contain hundreds of thousands of solar PV panels. To address this issue, a smart solar panel condition monitoring technique is studied in this paper with the aid of the U-Net neural network and Support vector machine (SVM). The research result has shown that using the developed technique, the thermal infrared images that are remotely collected by drones from solar power plants can be rapidly and automatically processed, analysed and classified with reasonable accuracy. This is of great significance to further improve the asset management skills in solar power plants.

Critical evaluation of solar chimney power plant performance

Long term supporting schemes for photovoltaic (PV) system installation have led to accommodating large numbers of PV systems within load pockets in distribution grids. High penetrations of PV systems can cause new technical challenges, such as voltage rise due to reverse power flow during light load and high PV generation conditions. Therefore, new strategies are required to address the associated challenges. Moreover, due to these changes in distribution grids, a different response behavior of the distribution grid on the transmission side can be expected. Hence, a new equivalent model of distribution grids with high penetration of PV systems is needed to be addressed for future power system studies. The thesis contributions lie in three parts. The first part of the thesis copes with the PV modelling. A non-proprietary PV model of a three-phase, single stage PV system is developed in PSCAD/EMTDC and PowerFactory. Three different reactive power regulation strategies are incorporated into the models and their behavior are investigated in both simulation platforms using a distribution system with PV systems. In the second part of the thesis, the voltage rise problem is remedied by use of reactive power. On the other hand, considering large numbers of PV systems in grids, unnecessary reactive power consumption by PV systems first increases total line losses, and second it may also jeopardize the stability of the network in the case of contingencies in conventional power plants, which supply reactive power. Thus, this thesis investigates and develops the novel schemes to reduce reactive power flows while still keeping voltage within designated limits via three different approaches: 1. decentralized voltage control to the pre-defined set-points 2. developing a coordinated active power dependent (APD) voltage regulation Q(P) using local signals 3. developing a multi-objective coordinated droop-based voltage (DBV) regulation Q(V) using local signals In the third part of the thesis, furthermore, a gray-box load modeling is used to develop a new static equivalent model of a complex distribution grid with large numbers of PV systems embedded with voltage support schemes. In the proposed model, variations of voltage at the connection point simulate variations of the model’s active and reactive power. This model can simply be integrated into load-flow programs and replace the complex distribution grid, while still keeping the overall accuracy high. The thesis results, in conclusion, demonstrate: i) using rms-based simulations in PowerFactory can provide us with quite similar results using the time domain instantaneous values in PSCAD platform; ii) decentralized voltage control to specific setpoints through the PV systems in the distribution grid is fundamentally impossible due to the high level voltage control interaction and directionality among the PV systems; iii) the proposed APD method can regulate the voltage under the steady-state voltage limit and consume less total reactive power in contrast to the standard characteristic Cosf (P) proposed by German Grid Codes; iv) the proposed optimized DBV method can directly address voltage and successfully regulate it to the upper steady-state voltage limit by causing minimum reactive power consumption as well as line losses; v) it is beneficial to address PV systems as a separate entity in the equivalencing of distribution grids with high density of PV systems.

In partnership with the Oregon Military Department, the Department of Energy used the award to assess and evaluate renewable resources in a 2,622-acre location in Lake County, central Oregon, leading to future development of up to 200 MW of solar electricity. In partnership with the Oregon Military Department, the Department of Energy used the award to assess and evaluate renewable resources in a 2,622-acre location in Lake County, central Oregon, leading to future development of up to 200 MW of solar electricity. The Oregon Military Department (Military) acquired a large parcel of land located in south central Oregon. The land was previously owned by the US Air Force and developed for an Over-the-Horizon Backscatter Radar Transmitter Facility, located about 10 miles east of the town of Christmas Valley. The Military is investigating a number of uses for the site, including Research and Development (R&D) laboratory, emergency response, military operations, developing renewable energy and related educational programs. One of the key potential uses would be for a large scale solar photovoltaic power plant. This is an attractive use because the site has excellent solar exposure; an existing strong electrical interconnection to the power grid; and a secure location at a moderate cost per acre. The project objectives include: 1. Site evaluation 2. Research and Development (R&D) facility analysis 3. Utility interconnection studies and agreements 4. Additional on-site renewable energy resources analysis 5. Community education, outreach and mitigation 6. Renewable energy and emergency readiness training program for veterans

As the solar PV power is unstable and poor regulation energy, and PV power generation is impacted largely by the weather and geographical, large scale PV power plants (10MW and above) will bring adverse effects to not only grid security, stability and economic operation, but also the grid power quality. As the technology and market development, when the installed capacity of PV power plants compared with the local power grid capacity in a comparable order of magnitude, the effect to grid should not be overlooked. The grid-connected PV power will bring many problems to the existing electric power generation models, grid technologies and economic etc. So it's very important to analyze these problems and propose specific solutions. The article discusses the technology of grid-connected inverter that can participate in power dispatching; low-voltage tolerance of PV grid-connected inverter; PV Inverter group control technology; power management and dispatching automatization of PV power plant.

Parabolic trough solar technology is the most proven and lowest cost large-scale solar power technology available today, primarily because of the nine large commercial-scale solar power plants that are operating in the California Mojave Desert. These plants, developed by Luz International Limited and referred to as Solar Electric Generating Systems (SEGS), range in size from 14–80 MW and represent 354 MW of installed electric generating capacity. More than 2,000,000m2 of parabolic trough collector technology has been operating daily for up to 18 years, and as the year 2001 ended, these plants had accumulated 127 years of operational experience. The Luz collector technology has demonstrated its ability to operate in a commercial power plant environment like no other solar technology in the world. Although no new plants have been built since 1990, significant advancements in collector and plant design have been made possible by the efforts of the SEGS plants operators, the parabolic trough industry, and solar research laboratories around the world. This paper reviews the current state of the art of parabolic trough solar power technology and describes the R&D efforts that are in progress to enhance this technology. The paper also shows how the economics of future parabolic trough solar power plants are expected to improve.

Energy demand and concerns over greenhouse gases have made the integration of solar PV into the grid imperative. Solar power forecasting models must have a high prediction accuracy to address the intermittent nature of solar irradiation. Solar PV power is significantly affected by the dust deposited on the PV panel surface. The amount of dust deposited on PV panel as one of the input parameters to predict solar PV power and solar irradiation is performed in this paper. Multivariate analysis of three deep learning techniques that is LSTM (Long short-term memory), 1D CNN (Convolution Neural Network) and BilSTM (Bidirectional Long short-term memory) to predict the solar PV power and solar irradiation with varying dust accumulated levels for the 335 watt PV module installed on the rooftop of the lab at Delhi Technological University is presented. An artificial dust scenario is created by continually incrementing the dust level by 1.258 mg/cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .

A simple, sensorless and fixed reconfiguration scheme for maximum power enhancement in PV systems

As the Indian solar PV market is burgeoning with 100GW target by 2030, solar modules competition is fast increasing. On the other hand, the reliability of solar modules is critical and they are either degrading faster or failing catastrophically well before their expected lifespan. The developers with large solar power plants are at risk. It is prudent to deploy modules from 3 to 4 solar companies to mitigate such risks. A case study is discussed to find out the nature and root-cause of failures and exercising early detection of the supplier of non-performing solar modules.

Identifying potential solar power generation sites using satellite apt images

In order to meet the environmental challenge in the 21st Century, renewable energy must play an important role. PV is one of the most promising renewable energy technologies. It may be no exaggeration to say that we’re now coming to the stage of energy transition by PV power plants. PV power plants came on the market first in the latter half of 2000s. Since then, a capacity of the largest PV power plant in the world has been broken every year. In 2014, some PV plants over 500MW started operation. Currently, a share of PV power plants will be 15% or more of the total PV installation in the world. The technical and economic feasibility of the large scale PV power plants are already proven, and the environmental and socio-economic benefits can make the project more attractive. To deploy large scale PV power plants as a major power source, the feasibility and expected benefits of PV power plants are analysed, as well as a potential for global energy system.