UC Irvine

As the State of California sets up ambitious goals to encourage the use of renewable energy, urban communities in California are starting to adopt community-wide solar photovoltaic (PV) projects with onsite generation. However, with the limited installation space and various structural conditions of rooftops in the community, the total available area to install a solar PV system is severely constrained. The aim to effectively offset the peak of the electricity usage of the community and the goal to increase renewable energy penetration could both be significantly limited. In this work, much in-depth analysis of solar PV installation and layout plans to maximize energy yield and to boost economic return is performed. Besides constant tilted PV array configuration, a novel PV installation layout, the incremental tilted layout, is proposed. For the constant tilted array, with maximum rows of module placed on the rooftop, it is desired to tilting the array at a low angle for roof pitch below local optimal tilt. Also, the low incremental tilting angle can achieve similar energy yield as the constant tilted array but could bring better economics return on a rooftop with low pitches. Meanwhile, a series of constructive strategies to effectively design a community solar PV project is proposed. The Oak View community at Huntington Beach is used as an example to demonstrate the proposed strategy. A community zone-map to deploy PV is created based on the location of critical electrical infrastructures. Overall, it is found that the weather condition and load profile can each significantly affect the solar penetration of the community.