Abstract:
Worldwide, all the countries are moving towards renewable energy sources to cater their energy demands. For Pakistan, solar energy is one of the best options among renewable energy resources and is free from air pollution and fuel usage. Ex-isting photovoltaic power plants experience reduced performance because the operat-ing parameters are ignored during the design phase of system like solar irradiance, wind speed and ambient temperature. The main objectives of this study are to design 1MW grid-connected PV power plant for sports industry, performance assessment of the plant and analyze the effect of outdoor parameters on performance of the plant. The average solar radiation at plant site is 4.55 kWh/m2/day and the average annual temperature is 25.18 0C. The simulation results acquired using PVsyst software are validated by comparing with the performance results collected at the PV plant site. The energy generated by the plant throughout the year is 1415.664 MWh/year which averages around 117.972 kWh/kW per month. The predicted energy generation by simulation results was 1437.1 MWh/ year which averages around 119.758 KWh/kW per month. The calculated results have shown that the annual average daily final yield, performance ratio and capacity utilization factor of the power plant are 3.93 kWh/kW per day, 76.5%, 16.17% respectively. The PV module efficiency, inverter efficiency and system efficiency of the plant is 13.19%, 95% and 12.8% respectively. The performance of fixed tilt angle is compared with seasonal tilt angle and it is ob-served that 5.28% energy generation increased by seasonal tilt as compared to fixed tilt. A detailed analysis is presented to investigate the effect of solar irradiance, ambi-ent temperature, and wind speed on plant’s output power. The regression analysis of the data presented in current studies show that ambient temperature is the dominant factor with correlation coefficient 0.9015 as compared to wind speed with correlation coefficient 0.7058. Moreover. The findings of current analysis indicate that the oper-ating conditions should be taken into consideration at designing phase of a PV power plant in order to utilize full potential.
