A New Solar Tracking Strategy to Upgrade Solar Power Efficiency using ZIP codes as an Alternative to Sensors

Over the last few years, solar trackers has gone from being a modern power technology to a major source of electricity production. Thus far, the solar tracking technology has dominated the market of solar power and renewable energy. Usually solar trackers use sensors to locate the sun's position with a high degree of accuracy; however; the biggest disadvantages of sensor based solar trackers is that they can be complex, inaccurate with the high response time and are slightly more expensive than their stationary counterpart. In that matter, the main objective of this work is to design a new, cost effective and simple solar tracker that increases the solar power efficiency without using sensors nor feedback loops. Instead, we have found a new and more accurate strategy to properly determine the position of the sun by using a tracking code that is based on countries ZIP codes. In this paper the design, simulation and testing of a high-precision and sensorless solar tracking system is carried out using sun position algorithm and astronomical equations. Results show that our tracking system can be 99.9% as accurate as a GPS based solar tracker; moreover, it can be flexible, efficient, low-cost and fitting for both large and small solar generation.