Operation of a photovoltaic system in the mexican electricity market

Abstract

Taking as a study case a Photovoltaic (PV) System installed in the Development and Innovation Center of Schneider Electric a whole study was realized. The main objective was to analyze the operation of a PV system in the Mexican Electricity Market and develop tools that can make easier to evaluate the performance of the installation. It produces less than 0.5 MW, in the current regulation is consider as Distributed Generation (DG). This kind of Power Plants (PP) can be interconnected to the grid and the owner has three contract options: Net Metering, Net Billing and Total Sale of Energy. In this case the better is Net Metering because the building consumes all the energy produced, but by having a contract with a supplier this field could earn Clean Energy Certificates (CEL). Three tools were developed to evaluate the economic and technical performance. The first tool is to graph the downloaded data acquired by the monitoring system. That daily data cannot be graph as detailed by the inverter’s provided interface after a day as if the user downloads the information. The second tool is required to find the greatest values of Irradiance, Temperature or Power in a month. When this tool is feed with the files of the month, each file will be paste in a new Excel workbook’s sheet, but in the first sheet the user, has a recapitulation per day of the greatest values. With all this ordered information could be prepare a generation profile of the area, and that stats can be used in future investment decision and forecasting. Finally, the third tool is dedicated to calculated financial indicators such as Payback and IRR. Some scenarios were studied and after applying some stimulus offered by the government that are reflected in the taxes payment, better results were obtained. With this tool is possible run scenarios and evaluate the profitability of new investments.