Predicting the performance of solar utility projects often relies on simplistic algorithms but these can be inaccurate and can cause uncertainty and risk for financiers and developers.
Through its Advancing Renewables Program, ARENA has injected $1.97 miliion into accelerating the development of SunSolve Yield, a simulation software that creates a digital twin of a solar utility project to accurately forecast the power output. And part of the funding deal includes making SunSolve’s suite of solar cell and plant simulation software available to ACAP member institutions for three years.
SunSolve Yield creates a 3D model with a high level of detail about the system’s structural components and the PV modules themselves. According to its developers, PV Lighthouse, the software can rapidly answer design questions that would previously have taken months to investigate and days to compute. Nextracker and 5B are both users of the product.
SunSolve Yield can explore the impact of different weather, locations or mounting structures and enables optimisation of the design, operation and financing of utility scale solar PV.
According to Keith McIntosh, Founder and CEO of SunSolve, “With SunSolve Yield you enter the dimensions and materials of the elements in your scene and it handles the complexity of wavelength dependencies, direct and diffuse illumination, electrical mismatch calculations and more.”
“Before SunSolve existed, developers did not have a modelling solution that could accurately represent their structures and modules. This meant they had to guesstimate several of the loss factors required for their yield forecasts. Now developers can rapidly calculate these factors with SunSolve, giving them greater confidence in their forecasts – a key advantage when negotiating project financing.”
ACAP member institutes can now use the SunSolve software suite free, for three years
SunSolve Yield uses the same core simulation engine behind SunSolve Power, PV Lighthouse’s commercial platform for simulating solar cells and modules. That means any solar cell or module designed in SunSolve Power can be used in SunSolve Yield.
SunSolve Power is used by Longi, Trina and Qcells to optimise their cell and module designs.
Under ARENA’s funding agreement, SunSolve Yield and SunSolve Power are available free of charge to ACAP’s member institutes for three years.
Researchers and students can build a digital twin of a solar cell or module and conduct virtual experiments. They can explore hypothetical designs and materials, including tandems and perovskites, and the impact of different parameters on performance.
Researchers can take designs from SunSolve Power and incorporate them into SunSolve Yield to model performance in the field.
Dr Phillip Hamer is an ACAP Postdoctoral Fellow at UNSW’s School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering and says, "The SunSolve Yield and Power packages are an integral part of our research.
“The ability of SunSolve's raytracing engine to simulate spectrally resolved photon absorption at the cell level is absolutely fundamental to our work on simulation of emerging, ultra-high efficiency cell technologies."
Komentar