Poly Crystalline 250w Module Made by Suntech.Co.

2.3. PV Plant Design

2.3.1 PV Panel Selection

Selected PV panel unit: Poly Crystalline 250W Module made by Suntech.Co.

This module is made by Suntech.Co from China. It is used by iDemand plant in western Sydney. In iDemand plant, it has 200 conventional PV panels which can produce up to 50KW power. From the statistical data of solar panel output in iDemand, we can get figure 1, which shows the monthly average power generated form a single panel unit in 2015. Note these data is for Sydney.

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Figure1. Average Power Generated A Single PV Panel Unit in Each Month in 2015

2.3.2 PV Plant Scale Calculation

From figure 1, we can calculate the total power generated from a single PV panel through a year is 392.6KWh, so that the average power generated form a PV panel is 1.0756KWh. This statistic data has already taken the weather change and night without sunlight into consideration. Then, from the RO process, we can get the total energy that a RO plant consumes is 1405KWh per day. So, in ideal condition, 1306 PV panels are needed to produce enough power for the RO plant. Table 1 shows the brief information of the PV plant.

As for the floor space, each PV panel has the dimension of 1640*992*40mm3. So in total, these panels need approximately 2124m2 to be placed on the ground.

Table 1. Summary of PV plant

2.3.3 Abnormal conditions

Because of its special feature, the operation PV plant will be greatly influenced by the weather, i.e. solar radiation. From figure 2, we can find the average solar radiation in every month in 2015.