Study of the effects of reference conditions on electrical properties estimation for PV modules under varying operating conditions

In traditional methods, electrical property estimation of photovoltaic (PV) modules is achieved through two steps. First, a certain condition (usually standard testing condition, STC) is selected as the reference condition, and the physical parameters under the reference condition are extracted from current–voltage data points. Second, physical parameters under varying operating conditions are obtained by transforming equations, and the electrical properties of the PV modules are estimated. In this paper, the influence of different reference conditions on the accuracy of performance estimation is studied. The estimation results using different reference conditions are compared to obtain the error distribution pattern, which has essential reference significance for the selection of reference conditions in practical applications. In addition, a method of the selecting reference condition is proposed. A new objective function is proposed by considering three key operating points for each I–V curve under different operating conditions, which balances accuracy and computational complexity. A large amount of experimental data for different types of PV modules are used to validate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method. In comparison with the traditional methods using STC as the reference condition and existing method in Matlab/Simulink, the results obtained by the proposed method exhibit better accuracy. It can be further used to estimate the output power of PV system under varying operating conditions.