Solar Electricity System Design for Administrative Buildings

Abstract

Regular availability of electricity is fundamentally important for everyday running and productivity of any organisation. In any modern society, stable and reliable electric power is a basic need, without which living condition becomes substandard and smooth business operations become difficult. Unreliability of power services in Nigeria is taking its toll on administrative, academic and research activities at Federal Polytechnic, Ede, just like other institutions in the country. Diesel generator on which the institution depends for alternative power source during outage is not sustainable as outage is too frequent and the duration is usually long, at times for days. This results in a very high running cost if normal activities in the institution are to go unimpeded. This work is on the design of 172.84kWP Solar Photovoltaic (PV) System aimed at permanently addressing the electric power challenges at the Administrative Blocks of the Federal Polytechnic, Ede. The proposed project’ design was simulated and the results show that its real life performance is highly promising. The least energy yield of the PV system occurs in June with 549.93kWh/day as against the maximum demand of 457.30kWh/day. The system performance is much higher in the months of September to March as solar irradiance is higher in these months. The PV plant has active service life of over 25years without significant change in its efficiency. The benefits of the proposed project are manifold. The project if implemented will solve the electric power problem of the institution at the Administrative’ Building by providing stable, adequate and reliable 24-hour a day electricity. The estimated cost of the proposed project is N45, 000,000  which is much cheaper than diesel generator and interestingly, is appreciably less than the cost of unreliable power supply from the grid. Keywords: Energy yield, off-grid, photovoltaic system, solar electricity, solar photovoltaic