A Comparative Study of Two Common Software’s used for Photovoltaic Systems, RETscreen and PVsyst

The use of solar energy in sunny countries is a promising way of compensating for the energy deficit. The benefits of this type of energy are not just economic, but also environmental, since it emits few greenhouse gases. NIGER, a vast landlocked country in the Sahel, has an average level of sunshine estimated at around 5 to 7 kW/m2/d for an average duration of 8.5 hours per day. However, the rate of access to electricity in Niger remains very low. As part of the government's policy to reduce the energy deficit, it has built a 7MW photovoltaic solar power plant at MALBAZA (TAHOUA). The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the PVsyst and RETScreen software packages, which are widely used in the solar energy sector. The results of the various simulations were compared with the average of experimental measurements collected over three monitoring years: 2019, 2020 and 2021. These results mainly concern parameters such as the capacity factor (CF), the performance ratio (PR) and the final yield Yf. Error matrices (MBE and NMBE) were used for validation. The plant supplied an average of 11995.94 MWh of energy to the grid during the monitoring period. We obtained a mean bias error (MBE) of 5.81% (PVsyst) and 0.14% (RETSceen) and a normalized mean bias error (NMBE) of 3.81% (PVsyst) and 0.27% (RETScreen). There is good agreement between the experimental measurements and the theoretical values. The RETScreen software has less mean bias error (MBE) and normalized mean bias error (NMBE) than PVsyst, giving a better estimate of the real values.