Estimating the produced power by photovoltaic installations in shaded environments

Abstract

A model to improve the estimation of the power and energy from photovoltaic installations under dynamic shading conditions is proposed in this paper. The model considers the shaded profile in each photovoltaic module and the temperature profile to update the model parameters of each photovoltaic module. The impact of dynamic shades on the power production is analyzed, illustrating the large errors introduced by classical prediction approaches, which consider non-shading at all or average shading. Moreover, a procedure to model the shades profile in any environment is described and illustrated. Finally, experimental irradiance and environment temperature profiles are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed model in contrast with the classical approaches. The results illustrate that the classical approaches overestimate the power produced by the photovoltaic array, in contrast with the power produced by the proposed model.