Levelized-Cost-of-Electricity-Driven Design Optimization for Medium-Voltage Transformerless Photovoltaic Converters: Preprint
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- University of Colorado
- University of Washington
Design approaches for power electronics are typically focused on efficiency and power density; however, these strategies do not guarantee cost optimality in any well-defined sense. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose a design framework that yields circuit parameters that minimize the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of a generation system. LCOE serves as a meaningful metric since it captures total lifetime costs -- including hardware, balance of system, and maintenance costs\textemdash and includes the impacts of power conversion efficiency and revenue from harvested energy. To obtain a tractable design problem, we formulate an approximate LCOE improvement model that quantifies the changes in LCOE resulting from a candidate converter design. We apply this framework to a multilevel cascaded topology for low-voltage dc to medium-voltage ac conversion without line-frequency transformers. An example 200-kW commercial-scale system is studied and the solution yields a design with 15 cascaded stages, 98.89% efficiency, and an LCOE reduction of 3.6%.
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office; USDOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC36-08GO28308
- OSTI ID:
- 1569962
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/CP-5D00-74141
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Presented at the 2019 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (IEEE ECCE), 29 September-3 October 2019, Baltimore, Maryland
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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