Publications related to Grid parity

Distributional justice, effectiveness, and costs of current and alternative solar PV incentive schemes in Switzerland

Like many other countries, Switzerland offers various incentives to promote residential solar PV, but not all households have equal access to them. Using a microsimulation approach based on merged data from the Swiss Household Budget Survey and Household E ...

2024

Network time series forecasting in photovoltaics power production

Jelena Simeunovic

Accurate forecasting of photovoltaic (PV) power production is crucial for the integration of more renewable energy sources into the power grid. PV power production is highly intermittent, due to the stochastic cloud behaviour and cloud dynamics. Previous w ...

EPFL2024

Balancing DSO interests and PV system economics with alternative tariffs

Christophe Ballif, Nicolas Würsch, Alejandro Pena Bello, Robin Junod

Distributed rooftop photovoltaics (PV) is one of the pillars of the energy transition yet their widespread integration strains grids, leading to over-voltage, reverse power flow, and infrastructure strain. Furthermore, increased PV self-consumption reduces ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2023

Wind farm power density optimization according to the area size using a novel self-adaptive genetic algorithm

Fernando Porté Agel, Nicolas Otto Kirchner Bossi

This work studies the power density (PD) optimization in wind farms, and its sensitivity to the available area size. A novel genetic algorithm (PDGA) is introduced, which optimizes PD and the turbine layout, by self-adapting to the PD and to the solutions ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2023

Resynchronization of islanded unbalanced ADNs: Control, synchrocheck and experimental validation

Mario Paolone, Sherif Alaa Salaheldin Fahmy, Quentin Walger

The problem of securely reconnecting active distribution networks (ADNs) - e.g. microgrids - to their upstream grids at the point of common coupling (PCC) has been extensively discussed by the existing literature. The latter is commonly referred to as resy ...

Elsevier2022

On the role of districts as renewable energy hubs

Luise Middelhauve

Although inevitable, the process of transforming urban areas into sustainable living environments presents many challenges. The decentralization of the energy system, the interconnection of multiple energy carriers, and the need to account for conflicting ...

EPFL2022

35 years of photovoltaics: Analysis of the TISO-10-kW solar plant, lessons learnt in safety and performance-Part 2

Christophe Ballif, Alessandro Francesco Aldo Virtuani, Eleonora Annigoni

The TISO-10-kW plant, installed in Lugano (Switzerland) in 1982, is the first grid-connected PV plant in Europe. In a joint publication (part 1), we presented the results of the electrical characterization performed in 2017-after 35 years of operation-of t ...

WILEY2019

Impact of advanced electricity tariff structures on the optimal design, operation and profitability of a grid-connected PV system with energy storage

Christophe Ballif, Nicolas Würsch, Lionel Benjamin Bloch, Jordan Holweger

The increasing penetration of residential photovoltaics (PV) comes with numerous challenges for distribution system operators. Technical difficulties arise when an excess of PV energy is injected into the grid, causing voltage rise or overloading of the li ...

2019

Solar irradiance estimations for modeling the variability of photovoltaic generation and assessing violations of grid constraints: A comparison between satellite and pyranometers measurements with load flow simulations

Mario Paolone, Fabrizio Sossan, Rahul Kumar Gupta, Enrica Scolari

Global horizontal irradiance (GHI) is typically used to model the power output of distributed photovoltaic (PV) generation. On the one hand, satellite estimations are nonpervasive and already available from commercial providers, but they have a limited spa ...

2019

Eco-Sim: A Parametric Tool to Evaluate the Environmental and Economic Feasibility of Decentralized Energy Systems

Jean-Louis Scartezzini, Dasaraden Mauree, Amarasinghage Tharindu Dasun Perera, Karni Siraganyan

Due to climate change and the need to decrease the carbon footprint of urban areas, there is an increasing pressure to integrate renewable energy and other components in urban energy systems. Most of the models or available tools do not provide both an eco ...

2019

A Comprehensive Assessment of the Short-Term Uncertainty of Grid-Connected PV Systems

Mario Paolone, Fabrizio Sossan, Lorenzo Enrique Reyes Chamorro, Enrica Scolari

One of the key aspects enabling the bulk integration of photovoltaic (PV) resources into the power grid is the short-term prediction of the maximum available power (from 100 ms to 5 minutes), and the quantification of the associated uncertainties. This is ...

2018

Photovoltaic Model-Based Solar Irradiance Estimators: Performance Comparison and Application to Maximum Power Forecasting

Mario Paolone, Fabrizio Sossan, Enrica Scolari

Due to the increasing proportion of distributed photovoltaic (PV) production in the generation mix, the knowledge of the PV generation capacity has become a key factor. In this work, we propose to compute the PV plant maximum power starting from the indire ...

2018

Hole-Transport Materials for Perovskite Solar Cells

Michael Graetzel, Laura Calio

The pressure to move towards renewable energy has inspired researchers to look for ideas in photovoltaics that may lead to a major breakthrough. Recently the use of perovskites as a light harvester has lead to stunning progress. The power conversion effici ...

Wiley-Blackwell2016

Modeling potential-induced degradation (PID) in crystalline silicon solar cells: from acceleratea-aging laboratory testing to outdoor prediction

Christophe Ballif, Eleonora Annigoni, Alessandro Francesco Aldo Virtuani, Hengyu Li, Laure-Emmanuelle Perret Aebi, Fanny Sculati-Meillaud, Marko Jankovec, Federico Paolo Galliano

We present a mathematical model to predict the effect of potential-induced degradation (PID) on the power output of c-Si modules in different climates. For the experimental part, we manufacture mini-modules made of two c-Si p-type cells, and use accelerate ...

2016

Large Scale Deployment of PV Units in Existing Distribution Networks: Optimization of the Installation Layout

Mario Paolone, Michael Lehning, Fabrizio Sossan, Annelen Kahl, Stuart John Bartlett, Jana Darulová

In fixed PV installations, the azimuth and tilt of the panels are normally chosen with the objective of maximizing the plant capacity factor. In this paper, we show that when considering distribution networks with densely clustered PV plants, there exist i ...

Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy2016

Highly efficient and stable planar perovskite solar cells by solution-processed tin oxide

Michael Graetzel, Ulf Anders Hagfeldt, Wolfgang Richard Tress, Michael Saliba, Antonio Abate, Konrad Domanski, Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena, Ludmilla Steier, Taisuke Matsui, Elham Halvani Anaraki

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are one of the most promising lab-scale technologies to deliver inexpensive solar electricity. Low-temperature planar PSCs are particularly suited for large-scale manufacturing. Here, we propose a simple, solution-processed te ...

Royal Society of Chemistry2016

A-Si:H/c-Si heterojunctions: a future mainstream technology for high-efficiency crystalline silicon solar cells ?

Christophe Ballif, Antoine Descoeudres, Stefaan De Wolf, Loris Barraud

In this contribution, we shortly review the main features of amorphous/crystalline silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells, including interface defects and requirements for high quality interfaces. We show how a process flow with a limited number of proce ...

Ieee2012

Développement et optimisation de revêtements minces nanostructurés pour capteurs solaires thermiques et modules photovoltaïques

Martin Joly

Renewable and available in abundance, incident solar radiation is an ideal candidate for energy production. The development of nanostructured coatings for the improve- ment of technologies that convert solar energy into heat and electricity opens interesti ...

EPFL2012