Experimental Performance of a PV-powered Center-Pivot Irrigation System

High-power diesel-based or grid-connected irrigation systems are giving way to high-power photovoltaic irrigation systems (PVIS) without batteries that reduce the energy costs by up to 80%. The operation of PVIS is affected by factors other than their quality, and there are no experimental data available about their performance. The traditional performance ratio (PR) needs to be factorized to better understand the losses strictly related with the PV system itself, the ones that vary with the crop and its irrigation period, what is intrinsic to the PVIS design, and what happens as a consequence of the behavior of the end-user. This article provides the PV community experimental performance data of a battery-free 160 kWp PV-powered constant pressure center-pivot irrigation system. The system has been analyzed over one year of real operation in which the performance ratio was 48.1%.