Long-term Costs and Benefits from Photovoltaics (PVs) for UK-Infrastructure and Society

geev1The project called “PV2025” is about Long-term Costs and Benefits from Photovoltaics (PVs) for UK-Infrastructure and Society.

The proposed project will deliver the tools required to allow a successful implementation of PVs in the UK beyond pure installation quantities.

It will investigate social and economic drivers, advance performance evaluation and prediction, deliver the required understanding of the impact of PV on the infrastructure and will create a feedback loop to evaluate how different regulatory frameworks will modify the installation side.

In a country such as the UK where the weather and socio-economic situation of the population vary significantly within the relatively short geographical distances and consumption patterns are highly variable in both short and long term scale. The implication of such location-specific variation offers significant challenges to the PV uptake power network design, operation and control. These variations render the uniform design and control methodologies of power networks ineffective. Technical questions to be answered in this context are:

(a) How do distributed new generation such as PVs and demand interact through the network in normal and disturbed state under various scenarios?

(b) Can the control philosophy of existing the network cope with this interaction?

(c) Do we need to have postcode based network design and control practice?

This requires a paradigm-shift in design, modelling and analysis of power networks. Another complexity to the questions and hence challenge to the solutions are how different penetration levels of variable generation influence the methodology, outcome and effectiveness of such potential solutions.

Official website: http://www.pv2025.org.uk/

CAP people

External

  • Prof. Ralph Gottschalg, Loughborough University, email: r.gotschalg@lboro.ac.uk
  • Dr. Paul Rowley, Loughborough University, email: p.n.rowley@lboro.ac.uk
  • Dr. Aysin Rahimifard, Loughborough University, email: a.rahimifard@lboro.ac.uk