A solar photovoltaic system produces electricity by converting energy from the sun. By the end of 2016, the global installed solar photovoltaic capacity reached 305 GW. Its growth is impressive in the last years; in fact, it was only equal to 41 GW in 2010. However, Europe has installed only 6.9 GW in 2016 (−1.7 GW in comparison to previous year) and this annual power installed is equal to 9% o...

Social interaction (peer) effects are recognized as a potentially important factor in the diffusion of new products. In the case of environmentally friendly goods or technologies, both marketers and policy makers are interested in the presence of causal peer effects due to the social spillovers that can expedite adoption. We study the diffusion of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in California, a...

− The paper describes the first results of a simulation and characterization tool useful to evaluate electrical performances of photovoltaic (PV) panels. A simple one-diode model is used in order to estimate the electrical parameters of a PV panel and predict how the I-V characteristic changes with environmental parameters such as temperature and irradiance. This work is part of a wider project...

Offsetting cities’ dependence on fossil fuels is one of the key factors for meeting the environmental targets set out by the European Commission (EC) by 2020 [3]. The penetration of small-scale renewable resources in domestic households (photovoltaic panels and micro wind mills) empowers dwellings to collectively reduce their carbon footprint. Incentivizing the injection and trade of locally-pr...

We present a modelling approach to support the layout optimisation of decentralised energy systems composed of photovoltaic (PV) panels and heat pumps with thermal storage capabilities. The approach integrates the simulation-based generation of model input on the basis of publicly available meteorological data and the subsequent optimisation. Selected results concerning the choice of an appropr...

This paper introduces the simple method of the mathematical modeling and simulation of current-voltage characteristics for photovoltaic panel. The aim of this modeling is to simply the nonlinear I-V model of photovoltaic panel to easily apply the model to the circuit simulators such as SPICE. So this paper is finding the parameters for the nonlinear I-V equations based on only the data such as ...

The paper adapts the NL-ESC technique to extract the maximum power from photovoltaic panels. This technique uses the gradient and Hessian of the panel characteristic in order to approximate the operation point to the optimum. The paper describes in detail the gradient and Hessian estimations carried out by means of sinusoidal dithering signals. Furthermore, we compare the proposed technique wit...

A sustainable residential microgrid composed of two distributed generation sources (photovoltaic panels and biofuel generator), one energy storage device (battery bank), and able of supplying both AC and DC loads, including a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, is proposed. The microgrid can operate in grid-connected mode and island mode. It is composed of a main DC bus and also an AC bus. The cha...

A hybrid renewable energy system is described which consists of twelve photovoltaic (PV) panels and a wind generator and can supply continuous electric power of 1.5 kW. An Energy Management System (EMS) was developed for this purpose in order to maximize the electric power produced using a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method and consists of Buck-type DC/DC converters controlled by a micr...