Additionally, with the anticipated decrease in the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) of solar PV due to ongoing technological advancements in the field, the current installed solar PV capacity is expected to further increase in the coming years. The Government of Mauritius had already announced in the budget speech 2023-24 that the installation of an additional 85 MW of solar PV is expected by July 2024. Nevertheless, in order to optimise the aforementioned initiatives, proper assessment of incident solar resources should be carried out to ensure strategic siting of solar PV plants. To that end, solar maps derived from in-situ insolation data prove to be a crucial tool. As such, a solar map for Mauritius can be reliably used to identify sites with the highest incident insolation for solar PV plants so as to maximise the energy production while enabling proper technical as well as financial appraisal of solar PV systems at design stage. Modelling and simulation of solar PV systems requires certain meteorological data such as daily solar insolation, peak irradiance values as well as temperature variations to analyse the behaviour of the system. These meteorological data can only be acquired through high-precision on-site measurements of solar radiation under the local environmental conditions. Consequently, under this project, the services of the University of Mauritius (UoM) were solicited for the development of a Solar Map for Mauritius and a memorandum of agreement was signed in November 2016 between the UoM and CEB to that effect. The objective of this project is to develop a free online GIS Solar Map accessible to general public which the solar PV industry may leverage on for the optimal and strategic integration of solar PV in the national electrical grid.

Key Project Members

The key project members are provided at the table below.

Equipment

Energy autonomous solar stations have been deployed across 9 Sites in Mauritius, 2 Sites in Rodrigues and 1 Site in Agalega configured to measure instantaneous global horizontal irradiance (GHI), plane of array irradiance (PoA), ambient temperature and cell temperature with a sampling rate of one minute. The sites details are provided in the table below.

The station locations are mapped in the figures below.

GHI values recorded using ISO 9060 secondary standard broadband EKO MS-802 pyranometers while PoA irradiance is measured using Si-O2-Pt mono-Si reference with integrated cell temperature sensor. Ambient temperature is measured with a platinum thermistor Pt100 1/3DIN (100 Ω at 0 °C). All the equipment was deployed in August 2017 and sensors at each station are connected to a signal conditioning element and a web-based data logger that transmits all measured data to a central server located at UoM. For more information on the network of sensors, system architecture, data collection, and data processing, the reader is referred to the work of Ramgolam and Chiniah (2019). The below figure illustrates the station set-up with a tilt angle of 20° facing North.