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Advancing Our Understanding of System Availability through the PV Fleet Performance Data Initiative

Conference ·
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The PV Fleet Performance Data Initiative partners with photovoltaic (PV) fleet owners to collect time-series data of PV production data and publishes aggregated anonymized results of system performance metrics. With an extensive dataset drawn from over 2,200 PV systems across the United States, comprising 8.5 GW and 24,000 separate inverter data channels, this initiative aims to ensure that systemic risks in the US PV fleet are detected. The current work explores system availability, revealing a pronounced dependence on time, especially within the initial 6 months of system performance. Following this start-up period, the average system availability stabilizes. Statistical analyses illustrate a median (P5O) monthly availability of 0.991 and a dependence on system size with a negative trend in availability with increasing system size. This finding indicates that larger systems experience lower availability compared to their smaller counterparts.
Research Organization:
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office
DOE Contract Number:
AC36-08GO28308
OSTI ID:
2499492
Report Number(s):
NREL/CP-5K00-92662; MainId:94443; UUID:1bab0e3e-5580-4c0a-a758-a7e9e0745256; MainAdminId:75697
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (5)

Overcoming Communications Outages in Inverter Downtime Analysis conference June 2020
Automated Shift Detection in Sensor-Based PV Power and Irradiance Time Series conference June 2022
PV Fleet Performance Data Initiative (March 2020 Methodology Report) report June 2020
Photovoltaic fleet degradation insights journal April 2022
A Reproducible Validation of Algorithms for Estimating Array Tilt and Azimuth from Photovoltaic Power Time Series conference June 2023

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Related Subjects

PV Fleet
SOLAR ENERGY
inverter availability
photovoltaic
solar
system performance