Open Source PhotoVoltaics Library for Systemic Investigations

Abstract

For the planning of photovoltaic power plants standard software tools are used. Most of these software tools use statistical solar data to determine the overall energy harvest of a photovoltaic plant over one year. The calculations rely on stationary location and ideal boundary conditions , e.g., constant ambient temperature. Even though, for example, shadowing may be considered by standard software, the investigation of untypical configurations and problems cannot be performed by such software, as most configurations cannot be changed by the user. The presented PhotoVoltaics library was developed with the intention to provide a flexible framework for standard and non-standard problems. Particularly, the PhotoVoltaics library can be coupled with other Modelica libraries to perform systemic investigations. An application library, PhotoVoltaics_TGM, is provided as add-on, where measured data of two photovoltaic pants of the TGM in Vienna can be compared with simulation results. This add-on library serves as validation of the PhotoVoltaics library.