ANNOUNCEMENTS
The Government of India has set an ambitious goal of achieving 40GW of installed capacity of the solar rooftop system by 2022. Currently, the total installed capacity solar RTS stands at 5.25 GW. Merely installation of the targeted capacity would not ensure exact generation by the solar RTS. The small solar rooftop plants are generally not equipped with detailed monitoring system, therefore it becomes difficult to analyse the performance of the plants. The study aims to develop a methodology to estimate the losses occurring at the site and based on that a simple O&M strategy is developed to improve performance of the system. Also, this study aims to validate the estimated returns of the plant under investigation.
The monitoring data for the year 2019 was used to analyse monthly average of three performance parameters used, i.e., energy yields, losses and efficiency a 40.2 kWp plant located in Mumbai. The PR and CF were 69.95% and 14.45% respectively. The yearly average module and system efficiencies were 12.29% and 11.84%, the system and capture losses were found to be 0.14 hour/day and 1.33 hour/day respectively. The actual parameters are compared with parameters obtained by PVsyst simulations and a thorough analysis was carried out to estimate differences in unavailability, ohmic, and soiling losses.
A simple O&M strategy was designed and cost-benefit analysis is carried out for the site by varying the cleaning. The estimated returns were validated and found that its returns were overestimated.
Keywords: Performance analysis, solar rooftop system, Operation and Maintenance strategy, PVsyst, Energy Loss, Photovoltaic, Grid Connected, Estimated returns
