Design and Evaluation of a Renewable Water Pumping System

Abstract

The design and evaluation of a stand-alone photovoltaic system for well pumping in agricultural application is presented. Given environmental (irradiance and ambient temperature), system (PV and battery technology, array geometry) and load (monthly daily demand) data, the optimal size of main components of PV systems are obtained by a sizing algorithm; specifically the output are: the surface of PV array and the battery pack capacity. The decision is made on the basis of the estimated power generation, the required power for the load, the water needed by the crops and the battery requirements. The proposed design is then evaluated using yearly simulations, on hourly base, performed by a specialized commercial software, named PVSyst, to show that the proposed optimal size ensures also an high reliability evaluated by two indices: number of autonomous days (NAD) and Loss of Load Probability (LOLP).