Collaborative solar powered neighborhoods

Abstract

Solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment has been steadily expanding over the past decade. While decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels will be beneficial for the environment, increasing our exposure to an intermittent renewable resource could have negative consequences on the electric grid. There can be oversupply conditions at midday when PV is outputting at peak power and also steep ramping of fossil fuel plants when PV is coming on or going off line. In this project, we investigated how to use more of the three-dimensional landscape of a residential neighborhood to flatten and lengthen the PV power profile. We built small modular houses with solar panels to characterize different configurations of solar panels and reflectors. We designed and built a set of I-V curve measurement instruments to allow us to collect separate I-V curve measurements from the difference faces of the experimental houses. We found that placing solar panels on the east and west facing roofs and walls of houses expands the power profile but it also leads to more interhouse shading which we quantified in our energy generation of the walls they abutted. Taken together, our findings give us the beginnings of a suite of techniques to apply to real neighborhoods with the aim of broadening the PV power profile and enabling solar panel deployment in previously overlooked areas.