Experimental Evaluation of Solar Power Plant Performances for the Choice of a Suitable Photovoltaic System

Abstract

The need for energy in many remote locations has led many researchers to look for an efficient and sustainable solution. And this necessarily involves using natural resources that are not limitless. These resources are even better solutions when they are of a renewable nature. Before installing any photovoltaic system on a site, factors such as the type of solar cell to be used or the temperature to be received at the solar panels must be taken into account. In this work, data are supplied by the external data acquisition bench, which is installed on-site. The robustness of the system is based on its ability to respond to sudden changes in insolation. For greater precision in the proposed method, five months are selected: December, January, February, March and April each year for four successive years. These values are used to determine the daily, monthly and annual average power output by the photovoltaic plant. To address this issue, a comparative study was carried out between two cell types: the monocrystalline silicon solar cells (MSSCs) and the polycrystalline silicon solar cells (PSSCs). Performance evaluation and the calculation of certain performance indicators show that the monocrystalline cell is more suitable for setting up a photovoltaic power plant in Ngaoundéré. Simulation results in MATLAB/Simulink reduce the quadratic errors to 0.97. This error is obtained by calculating the discrepancy between the data provided by the NASA site and the experimental acquisition bench installed in this locality. The calculation of the error shows that the method used is suitable not only for extrapolating power to implement the photovoltaic power plant but also for determining the type of cell to be used.