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Renewable energy technologies have an excellent potential in India and remarkable growth has been made to till date. During year 2014 an amount of 7.40 billion dollars had been invested for promoting and developing renewable energy across the country. This investment is 14% higher than previous year (Manju & Sagar, 2017). On the globe, India ranks fifth leading power generation capacity with 305.55 GW with an annual incremental rate of 9.4% having a renewable energy bases share of 44.236 GW (Kolisetty & Binu Ben Jose, 2018). In the climate conference held in Paris (COP21), Govt. of India shows its determination about falling carbon footprint by 33 – 35% by 2030 from its 2005 level, by augmenting the non-fossil fuel sector up to 40% of over-all generation ability (Hairat & Ghosh, 2017).
Many efforts are being made continuously to transform this energy in photovoltaic and thermal form. PV modules (solar cells) are exceptional in that they convert the solar radiation falling on their surface into electricity, without air or noise pollution. Dust elements dropped on a PV panel surface may affect its performance depending on the element origin, size and composition and it may reduce the incident solar radiation on the PV-cell (Du, Jiang, Liu, Wu, & Ghorbel, 2019).
The main objective of this work is to examine the effects of dust exposure & ambient temperature on the conversion efficiency of solar module system using Multivariate linear regression (MLR) model. The analysis includes not only performance outcomes of the conversion efficiency, but also have annual Capacity Utilization Factor (CUF) and Performance Ratio (PR) of the plant.
Solar Energy Perspectives
Indian subcontinent has a yearly average global solar incident radiation on horizontal surface, is about 5.5 kWh m2/day and has potential of generating 5,000 trillion kW's of clean energy (Shiva Kumar & Sudhakar, 2015). As per report in June 2016 renewable dependent capacity became 43,727 MW in the total of 303,100 MW (S. Sharma, Vishwakarma, Bhardwaj, & Mathur, 2018).
The National Solar mission under the program “Solar India” set a target of adding 2 GW of Off-grid capacity and 20 GW of Grid connected by 2022 in three phases. Table 1 shows the phase wise target of the mission.
Table 1. Phase wise target of the mission
| S. No. | Sector | Phase I target for (2010-13) | Cumulative Target for Phase II (2013-17) | Cumulative Target for Phase III (2017-22) |
| 1. | Grid associated Power including rooftop | 1100 MW | 10,000 MW | 20,000 MW |
| 2. | Off Grid Solar Applications | 200 MW | 1000 MW | 2000 MW |
Source (Raina & Sinha, 2019)