Abstract
Photovoltaic (PV) plants typically suffer from a significant degradation in performance over time due to multiple factors. Operation and maintenance systems aim at increasing the efficiency and profitability of PV plants by analyzing the monitoring data and by applying data-driven methods for assessing the causes of such performance degradation. Two main classes of degradation exist, being it either gradual or a sudden anomaly in the PV system. This has motivated our work to develop and implement statistical methods that can reliably and accurately detect the performance issues in a cost-effective manner. In this paper, we introduce different approaches for both gradual degradation assessment and anomaly detection. Depending on the data available in the PV plant monitoring system, the appropriate method for each degradation class can be selected. The performance of the introduced methods is demonstrated on data from three different PV plants located in Slovenia and Italy monitored for several years. Our work has led us to conclude that the introduced approaches can contribute to the prompt and accurate identification of both gradual degradation and sudden anomalies in PV plants.
Highlights
Evaluating the status of a PV plant is an important task in maintaining a high output performance and low operating costs
A crystalline silicon technology is used in all plants
The installed capacity of the plant is approximately 315 kWp and contains 1313 pieces of 240 Wp modules composed of multicrystalline silicon cells
Summary
Evaluating the status of a PV plant is an important task in maintaining a high output performance and low operating costs. Considering the cost-effectiveness of the different techniques for failure identification (visual inspection, thermography, electroluminescence, etc.) an efficient procedure for a plant evaluation is to first check for any power loss recorded by the monitoring system, followed, if needed, by other on-site techniques for identifying the plant failure [1]. Appropriate for online monitoring, should be used to detect any failure that causes power losses. A power loss in a PV plant can be correlated to the values of current, voltage, temperature, irradiance, thermal cycling, shading, and others [2]. Failures in a PV plant can be located in the PV modules, inverters, cables and interconnectors, mounting, or other components. Nowadays increasingly more research is being done on diagnosing a specific set of failures [4,5,6,7]
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