Comparative performance of grid integrated solar photovoltaic systems under the tropical environment

As the output from the solar PV systems varies significantly with technologies, designs and prevailing weather parameters, their evaluation under actual field conditions is important in identifying their real performance characteristics. In this paper, comparative performances of six different PV systems connected to a 1.2 MWp grid integrated solar farm are presented. The solar technologies considered are the single crystalline (sc-Si), poly crystalline (mc-Si), micro crystalline (nc-Si/a-Si), amorphous silicon (a-Si), Copper Indium Selenium (CIS) and Heterojunction with Intrinsic Thin Layer (HIT). Following the IEA guidelines, the array yield, capture losses, array efficiency ratio, and performance ratio were taken as the criteria for the performance comparison. Among the six different module types, the systems based on amorphous silicon and HIT offer the best performance under the tropical environment considered.