Simulated and Measured Performance Comparison of a Building-Integrated Photovoltaic Array in Iqaluit, Nunavut

Nunavut, located in Canada’s Arctic, has some of the most expensive electricity and highest greenhouse gas emissions per capita in Canada. Virtually all electricity is produced by diesel generators, leading to localized pollutants within communities and requiring costly expenditures on fuel and storage infrastructure. Increasing the share of demand provided by renewable energy is one method to reduce exposure to the negative impacts of fossil fuel combustion. This paper describes an attempt to better understand the performance of photovoltaic (PV) systems in Canada’s Arctic. In 1995, Natural Resources Canada installed a 3.2 kW building-integrated PV array in Iqaluit, Nunavut, and monitored it for nine years. For this study, the results of simulation models created in the TRNSYS and RETScreen programs were compared to the measured data. Both models significantly over-predicted system performance, by 24% and 45% respectively. It is surmised that this result is largely due to modelling errors converting total horizontal radiation to beam and diffuse radiation upon a tilted surface, although there is insufficient information to quantify the magnitude of the error.