Field Experience Detecting PV Underperformance in Real Time Using Existing Instrumentation
- Turbine Logic,Atlanta,Georgia,USA,30308
- Electric Power Research Institute,Charlotte,North Carolina,USA,28262
Maintenance at large-scale photovoltaic plants employs a mix of preventative and corrective maintenance practices. Large outages, such as an inverter tripping offline, are often easy to detect. More subtle sub-inverter faults and failures can accumulate and go unnoticed for months or years. A software-based fault detection method has been developed to analyze commonly measured data from large-scale PV plants for more timely detection of subtle underperformance. The method has been demonstrated on eight datasets from large-scale plants with high accuracy of detection. Results are validated using aerial infrared scanning. String outages are detected with a true positive rate of 73 percent and tracker issues are detected with a true positive rate of 88 percent. The developed method can be uniformly applied to photovoltaic plants across a range of scales and configurations to assess performance, quickly detect underperformance, and determine the source and location of failures. The results inform and improve operations and maintenance at PV plants, ultimately aiding in improved affordability, reliability, availability, and resiliency of solar electricity.
- Research Organization:
- Electric Power Research Institute
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office
- DOE Contract Number:
- EE0008976
- OSTI ID:
- 1960134
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-EPRI-8976-4
- Journal Information:
- 2022 IEEE 49th Photovoltaics Specialists Conference (PVSC), Conference: PVSC, 05-10 June 2022, Philadelphia PA, US
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Automatic Detection of Clear-sky Periods Using Ground and Satellite Based Solar Resource Data
|
conference | June 2018 |
pvlib python: a python package for modeling solar energy systems
|
journal | September 2018 |
Identification of periods of clear sky irradiance in time series of GHI measurements
|
journal | May 2016 |
Similar Records
High Energy Yield Distributed Architecture for Large Commercial and Utility-Scale PV Systems