PRESTO: A Simplified Program for Roof-Mounted Photovoltaic Array Layout User Guide and Design Document

摘要

A number of conditions guide the choice of the ''best'' array design for a roof-mounted residential photovoltaic system. These conditions include: operating the power conditioner at maximum efficiency; minimizing the energy lost when the power conditioner operating limits are exceeded; and fitting the available roof geometry. PRESTO, an interactive microcomputer program was developed to show the power ratings, voltage ratings, system efficiency, life cycle cost and series/parallel module arrangements for array candidates. The program prints a summary report of the candidate array electrical design parameters along with a schematic diagram of the series/parallel module arrangement and bus connections. With this information, the designer can choose the ''best'' array design. The program is written in BASIC and uses the PC-DOS operating system for the IBM-PC. The minimum configuration consists of: a system unit with random access memory of 64 K bytes, one 320 K byte diskette drive, a color/graphics display adapter and, a parallel printer adapter; a color graphics monitor, and, an 80-column dot-matrix printer. This report is a guide for the operation and use of the PRESTO program. It contains step-by-step operating instructions and examples as well as a discussion of the program's capabilities and structure. (ERA citation 11:053780)