An Experimental Monitoring and Comparative Performance Evaluation of a Solar Tracking-Fixed System

Abstract

Solar technology has been widely used nowadays because the source of sunlight can be converted into electricity and used by humans on the surface of the earth. The National Energy Policy (NEB) acknowledges the increase in oil prices in 2015 and the global electricity crisis adversely affecting Malaysia, which is solely dependent on oil. In general, when harvesting solar energy can be done, another challenge that will be faced is the inefficiency of solar panel arrays, and insufficient sunlight sources due to weather factors to generate more electricity. To solve this problem, another approach is to build an automatic system that consists of solar panel tracking, Light Dependent Resistors (LDRs), microcontrollers, and servo motors that are used to detect sunlight throughout the day to allow the system to generate maximum electricity. It was found that the voltage output from the solar panel detection approach is higher when compared to the horizontal method which is a fixed solar panel. Therefore, the output generated from the built system will be distributed to the rural population for daily use.