Experimental Determination of Panel Generation Factor for Apo Area of Federal Capital Territory in Nigeria

Abstract

The nature of renewable energy resources makes it necessary to perform site-specific resource assessment in order to achieve fairly accurate estimate of energy harvest so as to meet requirements of energy consumption and storage. Available design tools are based largely on remote modeling and estimation of site’s resource potentials. These design tools provide analytical value of the panel generation factor which may not represent the true value. The panel generation factor is used for design of solar photovoltaic systems. This paper reports on the panel generation factor obtained from experimental determination of its value for Apo Area of the Federal Capital Territory in Nigeria. The value of the panel generation factor obtained experimentally for Apo Area is 3.625. The panel generation factor reported in literature for tropical climate of Apo is 3.596. The value obtained for the experimentally determined panel generation factor represents a deviation of 0.88% in comparison with the value reported in literature, validating the value obtained experimentally. The site-specific requirement of renewable energy deployment is indicative of the usefulness of this experimentally determined panel generation factor.