Energy Productivity of Microinverter Photovoltaic Microinstallation: Comparison of Simulation and Measured Results—Poland Case Study

Abstract

From 2010 in Europe and from 2019 in Poland, the development of a significant number of photovoltaic (PV) microinstallations have been observed; for example, 1 million PV installations were built in Poland, September 2019–May 2022. A PV microinstallation is typically designed for a household (single-family house). Their capacity and energy productivity should be aligned with energy consumption in a given period, for example, a year (prosumer rules in Poland). The aim of this study is to verify the possibilities and accuracy of the use of PV energy production calculation methods in Polish conditions. The existing methods of calculating the energy produced may be inaccurate due to non-adaptation to terrain conditions, place, wind conditions, representativeness of PV panels in the installation, and many other factors. In the study, the HDKR (Hay, Davies, Klucher, Reindl) method was used based on data from the 0.25-degree (both longitude and latitude) mesh of ERA5 weather conditions. Then, the theoretical energy productivity from PV panels was calculated based on broadly used methods like those used in HOMER software. Statistical verification was done to compare the obtained energy production results from 10 PV panels with real results from microinstallations (energy productivity from each panel measured). The representativeness of the analysis period (one year) over the years was also checked using statistical methods. This is the first study to evaluate energy production from a microinverter installation in real conditions in Central Eastern Europe.

Keywords

• microinverter
• HOMER
• ERA5
• Poland
• validation
• renewable energy sources