IEEE PVSC 34 Paper Available
Jenn Coyle, June 16, 2009
My sources tell me that Brandon and Max had a great time mingling with the "solarati" at the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference last week, and the presentation was a success! The full paper (abstract below) is available on our Papers page.
and Correlation With Meteorological Conditions
B. Stafford1, M. Davis1, J. Chambers1, M. Martínez2, D. Sanchez2
1GreenMountain Engineering, LLC, San Francisco, CA, and Somerville, MA, USA
2Instituto de Sistemas Fotovoltaicos de Concentración S.A., Puertollano, SPAIN
Abstract: Tracker performance is a significant factor in the energy production of PV systems, especially concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) systems. The nonlinear relationship between CPV optic pointing accuracy and energy production means that simple metrics such as mean pointing accuracy are not sufficient for predicting performance of these systems.
Additionally, trackers are currently a significant component of system cost. Understanding the real causes of tracking errors in the field (as well as which types of errors have a less significant impact on energy production) is an important step towards the development of lower-cost tracking systems.
In this paper we present a collection of real-world data, including tracking error and corresponding meteorological data, gathered over a period of months from commercial solar trackers installed at Instituto de Sistemas Fotovoltaicos de Concentración S.A. (ISFOC) in Puertollano, Spain. We present several relevant mathematical tools for analyzing this data, and draw conclusions about the implications of tracking errors for system energy production.
