Technical modelling of solar photovoltaic water pumping system and evaluation of system performance and their socio-economic impact

Water is a precious resource for agriculture and most of the land is irrigated by tube wells. Diesel engines and electricity-operated pumps are widely used to fulfill irrigation water requirements; such conventional systems are inefficient and costly. With rising concerns about global warming, it is important to choose renewable energy source. In this study, SPVWPS has been optimally designed considering the water requirement, solar resources, tilt angle and orientation, losses in both systems and performance ratio. A PVSyst and SoSiT simulation tools were used to perform simulation analysis of the designed solar photovoltaic WPS. After designing and performance analysis, farmers were interviewed during fieldwork to assess socioeconomic impacts. In the result section, performance of PV system is analyzed at various tilt angles and it is established that system installed at a 15° tilt angle is more efficient. The annual PV array virtual energy at MPP of designed photovoltaic system is 33342 kWh and the annual energy available to operate the WPS is 23502 kWh. Module array mismatch and ohmic wiring losses are 374.16 kWh and 298.83 kWh, respectively. The total annual water demand of the selected site is 80769 m³ and designed SPWPS pumped 75054 m³ of water, supplying 92.93% of the irrigation demand. The normalized values of the effective energy, system losses, collection losses and unused energy in the SPVWP system are 2.6 kW/kWp/day, 0.69 kW/kWp/day, 0.72 kW/kWp/day and 0.48 kW/kWp/day, respectively. The annual average performance ratio of the proposed system is 74.62%. The results of the interviews showed that 70% of farmers are extremely satisfied with the performance of SPVWPS and 84% of farmers indicated that they did not incur any operating costs. The unit cost of the SPWPS is 0.17 €/kWh, which is 56.41% and 19.04% less expensive than the cost of diesel and grid electricity.