Energetica India - June 2020

SOLAR POWER Solar PV Design Optimization: Advancing Power Generation Efficiency The PV technology is a dynamic market where higher efficiencies and more organic material adoption continue to break records word wide. Bigger inverter sizes, more cleaning options for modules with newer cooling options to control heating losses is also having way in increasing the plant PLF and and has led to bankability of clean solar energy to replace carbon emitting fuel sources. 28 energetica INDIA- June_2020 Shilpi Dangi DGM-Engineering, Gensol Engineering Limited Solar has already displayed the techno-economic potential to go mainstream like fossil /coal fuelled power plants. It be- comes even more relevant with higher efficiencies and technol - ogy advancement in the PV technology space leading to drop in prices and achieving higher levelized cost of energy. The efficiency of PV modules (the capacity to produce elec - tricity from sunshine /m2 has increased almost double fold in last 10 years) with almost 1.65m2 sized PV panel producing 250wp then to 2m2 of solar PV panel now producing more than 500watts. Ground mounted solar power plants have seen tran- sition from 50MW been called as large installations to 300MW+ now becoming the norm for utility scale plants. The cost of en- ergy now been produced by the solar plants is much lesser then coal in most of the places across the global in regions experiencing extensive sunshine hours. Solar PV technology has seen a drastic shift in last 2 year when it has made a move from polycrystalline modules to mono crys- talline modules along with immense gain in bifacial technology along with tracker deployment. The new edge technologies have led to higher generation gains in terms of relative cost add on within the same land area. For same overloading percentage with central inverters for a region getting abundant sunshine (GHI*) close to 1900 to 2000kwh/m2 in a year expected generation numbers and gain seem has been mapped below: *GHI – Global horizontal insolation The factors that contribute to gain are: