Expected Energy Generation of the Solar Farm at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

Due to growing environmental concerns, electricity consumers are increasingly leaning towards renewable energy resources for electricity needs, with a remarkable emphasis on solar technologies, especially photovoltaics. PV generation can have huge impacts on the facility electricity consumption thereby reducing the cost of electricity. This project aims to calculate the output energy and impacts of a future photovoltaic solar farm funded by the University of Illinois in a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Phoenix Solar South Farms, LLC. It has a 5.87 MWp power output along with variable energy generation due to solar intermittencies. The project makes use of deterministic and probabilistic techniques to calculate the energy output. The project requires the collection of real time data of past years and clustering of the data using various algorithms to apply the techniques for energy calculation. The results achieved suggest that this solar farm might be able to generate electricity in a bracket ranging from 5.6 GWh to 6.4 GWh.