Procedure Used to Estimate the Power Production of a Photovoltaic Module Operating under Partial Shading Conditions

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology used to estimate the energy generated during one year by a photovoltaic module (PVM) operating under partial shading conditions. The methodology starts by calculating the solar paths and contours of nearby objects that produce shadows. Then, a method was proposed to estimate the shading factors of each submodule. Afterwards, the solar resource data and the calculated shading factors were used to feed a detailed PVM model to calculate the power–voltage curves for each hour, which were used to obtain a power profile and estimate the energy generated by the PVM in one year. The procedure was validated through simulation and experimental results. The simulation results consider a case study available in the literature, which was simulated to evaluate the effect on the PVM energy estimation considering and disregarding the partial shading conditions. The experimental results illustrate the capacity of the proposed methodology to predict the shaded and unshaded submodules and the module power–voltage curve. The results show that the proposed method avoids the energy overestimation introduced by classical estimation methods, which affects the sizing of a photovoltaic generator.