A New Approach to Estimate from Monitored Demand Data the Limit of the Coverage of Electricity Demand through Photovoltaics in Large Electricity Grids.

In a traditional large electricity grid without storage, there is a limit to the maximum photovoltaic energy that can be consumed as the demand and generation may not match, either in magnitude or in time. This paper aims to provide a new method to estimate the limit of the coverage of electricity demand by photovoltaics in large electricity grids. This new method eliminates the random and the periodic variability over time as it is based either on the load duration curve for demand and the output duration curve for PV generation. We will assume there is no energy storage or inter-network exchanges. Moreover, conditions for the best scenario for photovoltaics are provided in order to estimate the upper limit: photovoltaic overgeneration is not considered and a complete system flexibility is assumed. The knowledge of this limit will manage to provide not only a reference for the planning of the energy sector but also to analyze the viability of the integration of future photovoltaic projects in the electrical system. In order to illustrate the method, several large electricity grids have been analysed in order to determine the aforementioned limit. Values between 19.3% and 29.9% have been obtained.

Improvements in Performance Analysis of Photovoltaic Systems: Array Power Monitoring in Pulse Width Modulation Charge Controllers.

Various challenges should be considered when measuring photovoltaic array power and energy in pulse width modulation (PWM) charge controllers. These controllers are frequently used not only in stand-alone photovoltaic (SAPV) systems, but may also be found in photovoltaic (PV) self-consumption systems with battery storage connected to the electricity grid. An acceptable solution may be reached using expensive data acquisition systems (DASs), although this could be generally disproportionate to the relatively low cost of SAPV systems. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to develop new and effective monitoring techniques which will provide the PV array direct current (DC), output power (PA,dc), and PV array DC output energy (EA), thus avoiding the use of sophisticated DASs and providing high accuracy for the calculated parameters. Only transducers and electronic circuits that provide the average and true rms values of the PWM signals are needed. The estimation of these parameters through the aforementioned techniques showed high accuracy for both series and shunt PWM battery charge controllers. Normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) was lower than 2.4%, normalized mean bias error (NMBE) was between -1.5% and 1.1%, and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) was within 1.6%.