Techno-Economic Viability and Environmental Assess- Ment Study of Small-Scale Grid-Tied Rooftop Pv Plant Under Changing Weather Condition

Abstract

Land is a big issue in population dense country like India to implement large scale PV plant, whereas Grid-tied PV system is more economic than off- grid system in long run. The solar energy mission of the country will be success- ful if more and more small-scale rooftop plant will be developed. To address this issue and to find out different aspects of small-scale rooftop grid-tied PV plants, a 1kWp rooftop grid-tied PV plant is developed and different aspects of the plant on changed climate condition are studied. The study on the plant performance revealed that panel efficiency, inverter efficiency and overall system efficiency are 12.55%, 94.94% and 11.86% respectively. Array Yield, Reference Yield and final Yield of the plant are found to be 4.74,5.002 and 4.45 respectively. Also, authors analyzed capture loss, system loss and performance ratio are found to be 0.262,0.29 and 0.89 respectively. Reduction of the overall plant efficiency due to dust accumulation over the panels with changed climate condition is 0.6% for lower radiation levels and 1.6% for higher radiation levels after 4 consecutive non-cleaning days in Kolkata. Overall efficiency drops to 6.45% from 12.545% for continuous 60 non- cleaning days. From the environmental point of view the plant generates around 1149.75 kWh of electricity and fed to the grid which in turn reduces around 0.9 tons of CO2 to mix with the atmosphere annually. Apart from that the system has been compared with the simulation study in PV sol soft- ware and the production forecast, panel temperature and performance ratio has been carried out for annual basis. The payback period of the plant is evaluated as 11 years which is far less than the total life span of the plant which is 25 years. So, the results from the study sound positive for small scale grid-tied rooftop plants.