ii Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge the extensive contributions of the following people to this report. iii Preface Now is the time to begin planning for the integration of significant quantities of distributed renewable energy onto the electricity grid. Factors such as growing concern about climate change, adoption of state-level renewable portfolio standards and incentives, and...

Potential Induced Degradation (PID) is an undesirable property of some solar modules. The factors that enable PID (voltage, heat and humidity) exist on all photovoltaic (PV) systems, but the effect does not occur on all or even most PV systems. According to Dr. Peter Hacke of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), “All c-Si [crystalline silicon] modules have elements of reversible and...

Demand of energy is more sensible now because of population growth and economic growth of countries. In order to increase of energy consumption around the world and environment pollution, attention to the renewable energy such as solar energy is inevitable. Building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) electric power systems not only produce electricity, they are also part of the building. For exam...

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the energy production in the Maltese islands, focusing on the employment of renewable energies in order to increase their energy independence. The main renewable source here proposed is wave energy: thanks to a strategic position, Malta will be able to produce electrical energy using an innovative type of Wave Energy Converter (WEC) based on the prot...

This paper describes recent work on the development of a wireless based remote monitoring system for renewable energy plants in Malawi. The main goal was to develop a cost effective data acquisition system that continuously presents remote energy yields and performance measures. A test bed comprising of a solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant has been set up at Malavi Primary School and a central...

The exploitation of renewable energy sources and specifically photovoltaic (PV) devices have been showing significant growth; however, for a more effective development of this technology it is essential to have higher energy conversion performances. PV producers often declare a higher efficiency respect to real conditions and this deviation is mainly due to the difference between nominal and re...

In the United States, there is no comprehensive energy policy at the federal level. To address issues as diverse as climate change, energy security, and economic development, individual states have increasingly implemented Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs), which mandate that utility providers include a specified amount of electricity from renewable energy sources in their total energy portf...

We conducted an analytic study of concentrated solar photovoltaic and hot water co-generation based on various solar cell technologies and micro channel heat sinks. By co-optimizing the electricity generation and heat transport in the system, one can minimize the cost of the key materials and compare different tradeoffs as a function of concentration ratio or other parameters. Concentrated sola...

Solar photovoltaic (PV) electrification is an important renewable energy source. The electric which is converted directly from solar irradiation via PV panel is not steady due to different solar intensity. To maximize the PV panel output power, perturb and observe (P&O) maximum power point tracking (MPPT) has been implemented into PV system. Through a buck-boost DC-DC converter, MPPT is able to...