Deciphering Degradation: Machine Learning on Real-World Performance Data
The solar investment community is in need of up-to-date and data-derived system degradation rates to use in financial models that calculate the risk and expectation of energy revenue. To date, financial models choose degradation rates from past studies that are limited and may not be representative of solar projects in development today. As the solar industry expands in all sectors (residential, commercial, and utility), there is a growing amount of energy generation data available to analyze. With the help of the open source degradation analysis code (RdTools) it is now possible to derive degradation on an ongoing basis and continuously provide up-to-date durability statistics to the investment community. Ongoing and accurate statistics of fielded photovoltaic systems allows financial stakeholders to constrain energy revenue projections, lower financial risk, and increase the bankability of solar. This presentation will provide a mid-term progress update on a 2 year SETO-funded degradation project that involves applying RdTools analysis on kWh Analytics’ industry database. With results from the RdTools analysis in hand, machine learning methods are employed to quantify how much variance of system performance degradation can be explained by predictor variables such as environmental factors, equipment bill of materials characteristics, and system design information. The goal of this presentation is to promote the usage of RdTools on an ongoing to data owners and to solicit feedback from researchers and stakeholders on how to maximize impact of the SETO-funded kWh Analytics degradation project.
- Research Organization:
- kWh Analytics, Inc.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office
- DOE Contract Number:
- EE0008555
- OSTI ID:
- 1616659
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Photovoltaic Reliability Workshop, Lakewood, Colorado, 2020, Lakewood, Colorado, USA, Feb. 25-27, 2020
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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