Case Study - Large-Scale & Building Integrated PV

Name: Gold Coast Stadium (Carrara) Solar Halo

System Size: 215 kWp
Client: Stowe Australia (Co-Design)
Completion: March 2011
Précis: SunWiz performed Australia’s most complex PV design, overcoming
multi-orientation, multi-inclination, and shading. SunWiz’s solution elegantly
addressed the design challenges of an aesthetically-pleasing horseshoe-wave
panel architecture whilst overcoming the inverter topology constraints.

Design Challenges
Panels within a solar panel string should face in the same direction, otherwise
performance will be constrained by the worst-performing panel in any given moment – that facing most away
from the sun. The architecture of the sports stadium consisted of curved bays with 30° difference in pitch
between the end panels, the 270° of variance in orientation occurred around the football oval.

Through detailed performance simulation, SunWiz determined that dividing the bays into three would meet
the client’s performance requirements, producing 5 % more yield than if divided into two, and 9% more yield
than if undivided. To achieve further gains, a high-performance section of the bay was created by assigning
fewer panels to the northern-most string.

The bays of 14 and 18 panels were split into three by connecting adjacent same-facing panels from adjacent
bays into strings of 8 and 10 panels, in order to also fall within the inverter voltage’s window of operation.
Although Maximum Power Point losses result from an array with parallel strings facing different orientation,
SunWiz showed that losses were negligible, but that the design was indeed highly shade tolerant. As each
inverter input should have the same number of panels per string, strings of 10 were combined and treated
separately to strings of 8. Long wiring runs were minimised, though occasionally unavoidable due to other
physical constraints, including inverter dual-MPPT configuration and inverter location. Two standard inter-bay
wiring templates were created, and a global wiring naming was created to simplify the job of installers.

Through a 3D CAD solar simulation, SunWiz showed that the impact of shading from the light towers would be
minimised using this sophisticated design, compromising only 4% of the annual yield, even though some part
of the system would almost always be in shade at any one time. Further services provided on this project
included custom panel design, project management, REC creation, and ongoing system performance analysis.