A Comprehensive PVsyst Design for a College Campus in Baghdad

Nowadays, Iraq faces a difficult situation in power generation and high air pollution due to distributed diesel generators. Therefore, the electricity ministry has decided to import some electrical energy from neighboring countries like Turkey and Iran. Other power stations in Iraq also used natural gas imported from Iran. The traditional means of generating electric power are expensive and pollute the environment through carbon dioxide emissions that affect the environment. So, it is crucial to move toward exploiting environmentally friendly renewable energy resources to address this problem and change the energy system to renewable energy because it produces little or no emissions. Solar energy is a source of energy all over the world. This research aims to design a photovoltaic system at the university to Achieve the Near-Zero Energy Building (NZEB). This system is designed as an efficient, durable, and environmentally friendly photovoltaic system by using photovoltaic panels on the rooftops of the campus buildings in the Technical College of Electrical Engineering, Baghdad, Iraq (Latitude 33° 15′ 28.56″ N, Longitude 44° 23′ 45.13″ W). The importance of energy for the campus in terms of electricity generation and consumption to meet Campus requirements, which is the basis of the academic blocks of different departments because classrooms, laboratories, etc., need continuous power. After modeling all the campus buildings, it's found that all the possible areas to install photovoltaic panels. Then it adopted a general energy audit method to calculate the annual campus loads ≈ (1153 MWh/year). Finally, this PV system is designed and analyzed according to available area and loads using PVsyst 7.2 software based on the collected data. The study results showed that the design could produce energy (645 MWh/year), representing about (55.94%) of the university's total annual energy consumption. The proposed design consists of five inverters with 66 kVA each and 720 PV Panels, 540 Wp each.