Presentation Details
| Impacts on backtracking energy generation from underlying terrain undulations and varying motor block size William J.Hayes, Kendra Conrad, Kyumin Lee. Array Technologies, Inc, Albuequerque, NM, USA |
Abstract
Single-axis tracker (SAT) solar power systems are being installed across undulating terrain at scale, creating a need to accurately model the impact of terrain-aware backtracking on energy production. In this modeling study, the impact of the size of a motor block (the number of tracker rows mechanically linked to a single motor) is evaluated for PV projects with undulating terrain, comparing the motor-block sizes of 32-rows per block, 8 rows per block, 2 rows per block, and 1 row per block. For the projects simulated, optimizing backtracking with 32-row motor blocks brought 1.2% to 1.4% energy gain compared to the baseline case of ignoring the underlying slope. Optimizing 8-row motor blocks brought additional 0.3% to 0.4% energy gain relative to the 32-row case, and optimizing 2-row blocks brought additional 0.1% to 0.3% energy gain relative to the 8-row case. We did not observe meaningful differences between the 2-row and 1-row cases. We found a correlation between local energy differences and local terrain undulations. We found that appreciable (> 1%) differences in energy generation between the different motor-block sizes can arise in areas of a project where the local terrain undulation leads to row-to-row slope variation exceeding 4 degrees. However, for the projects studied, using terrain data for real utility-scale PV projects, only small fractions of the area covered by the projects had such extreme undulations, resulting in <1% energy differences at the project level. We describe our modeling method in detail and list the necessary features for commercial PV modeling software to simulate SATs on undulating terrain.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author.