A correlation between simulated and real PV system in naval conditions

In the middle of a continuous and exponential development of renewable energies trend, generated by the increasing price of the conventional fuels which are quickly draining, and facing the fact that we have tremendous messages sent by our polluted Planet, the IMO (International Maritime Organization) returned its face to environment concerns in 2008. During time IMO has realized a series of environment impact studies of maritime domain and, in concordance with this idea, developed IMO's Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC). MEPC has given extensive consideration to control of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from ships which are implemented in MARPOL Annex VI as a new Chapter 4, entitled “Regulations on energy efficiency for ships”. We strongly believe that there will be a rapid grow in the number of ships which will have renewable energies systems onboard in the near future. One kind of energy that can be very well applied to the naval domain is the solar energy. As the technologies are developing very fast in the domain of photovoltaics, there is a continuous need of research in order to implement the best technical solutions in naval domain, which, as we know, presents different characteristics from classic terrain applications. Thus, there are some questions that we tried to respond on this article, as: “what is the difference between efficiency of an onboard installed PV panel and a classic terrain installed PV panel?; how much will affect the albedo of the water?; how much will affect the ships' oscillation moves?; how is comporting a vertical Sun facing PV panel and a non-facing one? To respond at these questions we realized a comparative study between a simulated PV system and its similar real system installed onboard, in order to determine the differences between results and estimate how much we can take in consideration from a simulated PV classic system when we design a real onboard PV system.

I. Introduction

The IMO (International Maritime Organization) through its Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) has realized a series of reports about GHG (Greenhouse Gases) emissions for international shipping in the period 2007 to 2012[1] which indicate that total shipping transport is responsible for 3.1% of annual global and 2.8% of GHG emissions on equivalent basis. In the Fig. 1 is presented a comparative study between shipping CO2 and emissions compared with global total CO2 and CO2e emissions from 2007 to 2012. The final report presents also some projections of maritime GHG emissions in the period up to 2050. The increasing demand for shipping transport correlated with a low level of transition from using fossil fuels instead of renewable energies will conduct to a GHG emissions grow within 50–250% in the period up to 2050[1]. Fig. 1.

A) shipping co2 emissions compared with global co2 (values in million tones co2); and b) shipping ghgs (in co2e) compared with global ghgs (values in million tones co2e).[1]