Since February 2013, University of Almería campus accounts for a solar plant located on its East carports area. The plant property and commissioning was agreed with a specialized a company, which is in charge of operation and maintenance tasks. It has 4830 p-Si modules, reaching an overall surface of 8.000 m2 distributed in a 15.000 m2 car park. The modules are grouped in arrays connected to 10 grid tie inverters 100 kW each. In addition to this plant, devoted to the injection of solar electricity to the UAL grid, there are three experimental 5,5 kW plants having three different modules technologies. The objective of these three plants is the intercomparison of the performance of polycrystalline, monocrystalline and thin film solar cells. Overall installed peak power is 1176,5 kW.
The average yearly production of the plant is 1,8 GWh, which results in a solar fraction of the installation, in regard to UAL, of 0,25. In addition to the specific developments and analysis in the three experimental facilities, the plant production data are used for the validation of models which are considered to be introduced in the distributed energy systems simulations tools under development.
