Estimation of energy gain improvement of various tracking techniques for LSS photovoltaic system

Abstract

The produced electrical energy from a solar photovoltaic (PV) system can be increased via using manual or auto solar tracking strategy. Generally, compared with the fixed solar system, the auto dual (two) axis tracker will give the highest energy output improvement, followed by the auto single (one) axis tracker then the manual adjusted tilt angle (monthly and seasonally) solar system's respectively. However, the magnitude of the improvement varies from one location to another location due to the latitude angle difference between them. The improvement can be high at one location, but its low at another location. Thus, an exhaustive simulation analysis for each strategy is needed to be conducted before their energy output improvement can be determined for a specific location. Not only it will be time consuming, but also it will be impossible for a person with no PV simulation tool skills to perform this task. This research presents a simpler method for estimating the generated energy performance (the energy gain, %) of the large scale solar (LSS) system for various tracking strategies. The mathematical equations are developed from the exhaustive simulation results. The proposed method is tested on (12 selected cites) that included in our research recently as well as it also tested on another (two new cities) with the main error (between 0.0% and 0.56%) is observed.