Sustainable solar power from wall mounted photovoltaics

The plausibility of wall-mounting of photovoltaics in inaccessible or restricted rooftops to generate power necessitated this study. Meeting energy consumption demands is an infrastructural challenge in several developing economies. Power generation could leverage on the photoelectric effect from intense diffuse radiation and intermittent direct solar radiation abundantly available in tropical Africa, near the equator. A test-bed was developed and an investigation was conducted into the energy consumption needs of small and medium scale buildings; namely, offices and small homesteads. The prototype test-bed was found to provide all the power requirements of an average consumer utilizing less than 5000 Watts daily load from the Sun’s conventional daily migration from east to west. Increase in generated and consumed Wattage has been observed to increase with scalability of photovoltaics participating in the east, front and west wings of test-bed. The spatial analysis of the trajectory of solar energy for both directed and diffused intense solar radiation was also carried out in this work. The need of blocking power leaks to dormant photovoltaics due to conduction through less resistance pathway by active photovoltaics, via diode compensation or relay blocking was also discovered to increase the overall power generated that was available to the interconnected loads.