PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A500 KWP SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC POWER PLANT CONNECTED TO GRID USING PVSYST SOFTWARE, IN LAMBAYE AREA, SENEGAL

This article presents a simulated evaluation of the performance of a 500 kWp grid-connected solar photovoltaic system. The study aimed to assess the feasibility of installing such a system to supply power to several villages in the municipality of Lambaye in Senegal. The municipality faces electricity load shedding due to high population growth and womens participation in income-generating activities. The system under study comprises 1,350 panels of 370 Wp each. It is configured with 45 strings connected in parallel, each of them consists of 30 panels connected in series. The results revealed that six Generic solar inverters of 60 kW power each, ensuring DC-AC conversion and interconnection to the grid by a public meter are needed. This study used PVsyst 7.2 simulation software, which incorporates the Meteonorm 8.1 database. The meteorological and geographical data used for the simulation were imported from Meteonorm 8.1. The parameters evaluated in this study were the effective energy production of the photovoltaic generator, the energy fed into the grid, the performance ratio and the normalized energy production per kWp installed. We simulated a 500 kWp solar photovoltaic system for grid injection using PVsyst software. This system produced 835.09 MWh/year of energy at the output of the photovoltaic generator, and 820.07 MWh/year of energy was injected into the grid. The performance ratio of this solar PV system for grid injection in the municipality of Lambaye is approximately 82.24%, with lower losses.