Energy Yield of Tracking Type Floating Solar PV Plant

Abstract

Floating PV System (FPV) is an innovative technology in which solar PV panels are installed on a stable water body in order to avoid the problem of intense land requirements. The efficiency of a floating PV system is higher than the land-based PV system because of the cooling effect of water. A solar tracker system can be incorporated with such fixed FPV to further improve the performance. In this paper, the study of the energy yield of the tracking type FPV plant is carried out. 1 MW FPV plant is considered at Ambazari lake Nagpur, India. The PV-Watts Calculator has been used to obtain monthly solar radiation data for Nagpur city. The MATLAB code has been developed to calculate DC output, amount saved and CO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> emission reduction. The 1 MW FPV plant generates 18,71,229.186 kWh per annum with fixed tilt equal to latitude, 22,02,749.886 kWh per annum with 1-axis tracking and 23,62,076.129 kWh with 2-axis tracking. The monthly DC power output of floating PV plant has been calculated using the water cooling effect and compared with the power output of the existing ground-mounted PV plant.