An Accurate Method for Photovoltaic Array Sizing

Abstract

Solar projects of various sizes have been completed in various regions of the world. One important problem in Photovoltaic array deployments is sizing the array. We propose a PV array sizing method based on the numerical PV array model [1] to determine the average power per cell (APPC), and then determining the number of parallel strings and number of PV module per string based on the desired power and the APPC. The numerical method can be used once to obtain APPC for the given PV module and environmental parameters, then the proposed sizing procedure can be used to obtain the PV array's number of parallel strings and number of PV modules per string generating a certain desired power. Examples are provided to illustrate the proposed method.