Prediction of energy production is crucial to the design and installation of the building integrated photovoltaic systems. This prediction should be attainable based on the commonly available parameters such as system size, orientation and tilt angle. Several commercially available as well as free downloadable software tools exist to predict energy production. Six software models have been evaluated in this study and they are: PV Watts, PVsyst, MAUI, Clean Power Estimator, Solar Advisor Model (SAM) and RETScreen. This evaluation has been done by comparing the monthly, seasonaly and annually predicted data with the actual, field data obtained over a year period on a large number of residential PV systems ranging between 2 and 3 kW_dc. All the systems are located in Arizona, within the Phoenix metropolitan area which lies at latitude 33° North, and longitude 112 West, and are all connected to the electrical grid.

Date Published: 10 September 2008
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 7048, Reliability of Photovoltaic Cells, Modules, Components, and Systems, 70480W (10 September 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.794245

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7048:
Reliability of Photovoltaic Cells, Modules, Components, and Systems
Neelkanth G. Dhere, Editor(s)