Photovoltaic Energy Generation

In the Photovoltaic (PV) Solar Generation projects, GridPIQ estimates how the addition of a new PV project within the power grid will impact the regional load profile. These changes to load shape are in turn used to quantify system impacts. The flow chart below provides an overview.

GridPIQ provides two project modules for photovoltaic (PV) energy generation, the difference between the two being how the hourly output of the PV system is established. The PV Data Upload project module allows the user to upload an hourly time series of the PV system’s AC output in W, kW or MW while PV Data Modeling leverages NREL’s SAM tool to model the system’s performance with user-defined PV system parameters. Regardless of which method is used to establish the project’s output time series, these data must map one to one with the pre-project load profile. Each hourly PV system output value is then substracted from the corresponding hourly pre-project load profile to generate the post-project load profile, which can then be used to estimate the project’s impacts.