FEASIBILITY STUDY OF COMMERCIAL SILICON SOLAR PV MODULE BASED LOW- CONCENTRATION PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEM BRIJESH TRIPATHI 1,2 , PANKAJ YADAV 2 , MAKARAND LOKHANDE 1 & MANOJ KUMAR 1 1 School of Technology, Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, Gandhinagar – 382007 (India) 2 School of Solar Energy, Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, Gandhinagar – 382007 (India) ABSTRACT A concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) system has a potential for further cost reduction of solar Photovoltaic (PV) power as compared to flat panel PV. In this work a piecewise linear parabolic trough is designed to reflect the solar radiation with uniform intensity on the PV module receiver system. Silicon solar PV module based CPV system is modeled and simulation is done to study the variation of output power, open-circuit voltage and short-circuit current with respect to module temperature and irradiance. These simulation results are experimentally validated using a CPV (CR ~ 8) system developed in laboratory. The results confirms that the commerically available silicon solar PV module performs satisfactorily upto ~ 8 Sun concentration. KEYWORDS: Concentrator Photovoltaics (CPV), Current-Voltage Characteristics, Modeling, Simulation INTRODUCTION Silicon based solar photovoltaic (PV) technology has emerged as a potential renewable energy source for future power requirements. Still the cost reduction of this technology is an important area of concern. There are several ways by which the cost of this technology can be reduced. One of them is to reduce usage of costly silicon material for solar energy conversion. The amount of costly PV material consumed/Watt of generating power can be reduced by using thinner wafer, thin-film solar PV technologies or by concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) technology. Compared to non-concentrating solar PV systems, the required area for solar PV module is reduced by the factor of concentration ratio, providing significant reduction in the cost of solar PV system. The considerable amount of research is going-on in the field of CPV systems with different optics (mirrors or lenses—Fresnel or anidolic), spot sizes and geometries, tracking strategies, cooling systems (active or passive) and cells (Si or III–V compound semiconductors, whether single or multi-junction) [1, 2]. Above all, only multi-junction III– V-based solar cells (MJ sells) have achieved an efficiency of 43.5% at 500 Suns for a triple-junction metamorphic solar cell at laboratory level as reported in [3] but they are quite expensive [4] and for bringing them to commercial level, it needs geometrical concentration ratio (CR) of greater than 500. Generally, higher the concentration ratio, greater the accuracy needed in tracking the Sun and smaller the International Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Research (IJEEER) ISSN 2250-155X Vol.2, Issue 3 Sep 2012 84-93 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.,