PV Modeling as a Community Resource
Abstract
Northern Colorado communities have adopted policies that encourage utilities to implement 100% carbon free electricity by 2030. For example, Fort Collins is adding a new PV solar system nearly every day (350 in 2018) to support their climate and energy policy goals. Accurate PV modeling is well established, but often too complex to be readily employed in education or for use by municipal utility staff or energy researchers – the type of stakeholders needed to build community support for solar energy. Colorado State University has developed PV-STEM, a PV modeling tool that is both simple enough to teach solar engineering principals to STEM students and accurate enough to support local utility planning studies and university research. PV-STEM incorporates solar engineering principles developed by NREL, Sandia National Labs and NOAA into an open-source Python code accessible to novice software programmers that only requires commonly available PV system and local weather information. The model has been validated against ten operating PV systems and against PVWatts®. In addition to STEM education, the model has been used to enhance understanding of PV generation on the community’s electric distribution system (generation profiles, PV customer load research, policy analysis, resource forecasting, etc.). User guidelines, teaching slides and open source Python code will be available for interested parties.
Keywords
Pv modeling, Stem education, Community resource planning