Performance evaluation of parking integrated grid-connected photovoltaic system located in Northern India

In the recent years, small-scale grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) plants got attention from institutions and organizations. In this series, a parking integrated grid-connected PV system has been installed in the university situated in the northern region of India. The plant consists of some partially shaded PV modules. In the literature, the shading effect has not been analyzed yet in the performance evaluation of the PV plant. In this study, performance evaluation has been carried out based on the International Electro-technical Commission 61724 standard considering shading effect. An adequate number of software are available for estimation of the plant, but among them PVsyst and PV*SOL software have the feature to observe shading effect on the plant by creating an actual three-dimensional environment of the plant in the software. Hence, the results of the actual plant have been compared with those obtained from these two software. In this study, technical and financial analysis has also been carried out. Through the performance evaluation, it has been found that the specific annual final energy production of the PV plant is 988.9 kWh/kW, the payback period of the plant is almost 17 years, and the annual loss of production due to shading effect has been evaluated as about 16%. From these results, it can be concluded that the plant is demonstrating considerably good performance even while facing shading in parking integrated grid-connected PV system and is technically/economically feasible for electricity generation in northern India without taking extra space. This study would be helpful in designing of small-scale PV plant in an institution or organization in the areas even where partial shading is also present. This study would also be helpful in the development of large-scale parking integrated grid-connected PV systems.