First Year Performance of a PV Plant in Jordan Compared to PV Plants in the Region

Abstract

The paper presents the first year (2014) performance analysis of a 276 kWp grid-connected roof-type solar PV plant located at the campus of Al-Ahliyya Amman University in Jordan, using monitored data. The plant is installed on 3000 m2-roof of Arena building at University campus. The array consists of 1176 modules with two orientations 10° and 15°.  The PV array is configured in a way that the system includes 14 panels in parallel with 14 inverters. The plant is equipped with a monitoring system which is connected to the internet and gives the data on a daily basis. The study shows that the actual and estimated specific energy production are 1639kWh/kWp-year, and 1726 kWh/kWp-year, respectively. The annual capacity factor and performance ratio are found to be 18.7% and 87.5%, respectively. The actual energy production is found to be 452406 kWh/year, whereas the estimated annual energy production is found to be 476467 kWh as calculated using the software PVsyst V6.32 . The measured and estimated yields are in close agreement to each other with a relative error of about 5%.  It is found that the actual yield is maximum in July and minimum in January. The analyzed plant is compared to PV plants worldwide, and particularly in detail to a PV plant in Syria. The comparison shows that the overall performance of the AAU plant is excellent.