An automated high-granularity tool for a fast evaluation of the yield of PV plants accounting for shading effects

In this paper, an automated tool for the evaluation of I–V characteristics and energy yield of photovoltaic (PV) plants is proposed. The tool translates an AutoCAD drawing of the plant and surrounding obstacles into an in-house Matlab code that automatically generates an equivalent circuit representing the system, which is in turn solved by PSPICE. The plant is described at a high-granularity single-cell level, so that also the non-intuitive influence of small-area shadows can be accurately predicted. Nevertheless, the robust PSPICE engine ensures short simulation times.

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