Lesson 4 Activity

PRESENTER: Welcome to Sunny Design Web. No registration is required to try out our design software. It is also possible to design PV plants without registering. Registered users benefit in many ways, however. After registering for free, you can save and manage projects, create your own PV modules and locations, as well as create your own load profiles and personalized project documentation.

For a new project, assign a project name and specify the location of the PV plant. Based on your selection, Sunny Design Web considers all settings related to the location, including system voltage and underlying legal conditions. You can review all of these settings, and adapt them as needed. Then it's time to configure the PV plant.

First, select the manufacturer and the PV module. Adjust the number of PV modules or the desired peak power. The orientation and mounting type of the PV generator can also be modified as needed. Now you can manually select the inverter, generate the design automatically, or display a list of design suggestions. Sunny Design Web takes into consideration the normative requirements at the location, such as the displacement power factor. A suggestion is computed.

In addition, Sunny Design Web offers the option of restricting the choice of inverters or sorting them by various criteria. The desired design can now be selected and then adopted with a click on the lower right. In the inverter details, you can see at a glance how the PV modules are connected to the inverter, as well as the detailed inverter configuration.

In the next step, you determine the optimal cable dimension from the desired cable length, the cross-section, and the desired DC and AC cable material. Sunny Design Web recommends the minimum required cable cross-section. After dimensioning the cable, continue with determining your possible self-consumption.

You can estimate your possible self-consumption of the generated PV energy with just a few clicks. For this, you merely need to select a load profile and the annual energy demand. To optimize self-consumption, Sunny Design Web also takes the integration of battery storage systems into consideration. In the Results Report, you can see, among other things, the possible self-consumption quota, both with and without optimization via energy storage. The overview summarizes, once again, entries, results, and current information on the PV plant.

All result values are displayed in compact form under Results. To print project documentation or output it as a PDF file, simply click on Document and Output Format under Settings. Choose the desired documents and paper size, and simply click on Download Project Documentation. The selected combination will be displayed accordingly in the preview. This completes the plant design.