Journal
IEEE JOURNAL OF PHOTOVOLTAICS
Volume 8, Issue 2, Pages 525-531Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/JPHOTOV.2017.2779779
Keywords
Degradation rates; durability; photovoltaic (PV) field performance; PV lifetime; reliability
Funding
- U.S. Department of Energy [DE-AC36-08-GO28308]
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory
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The degradation rate plays an important role in predicting and assessing the long-term energy generation of photovoltaics (PV) systems. Many methods have been proposed for extracting the degradation rate from operational data of PV systems, but most of the published approaches are susceptible to bias due to inverter clipping, module soiling, temporary outages, seasonality, and sensor degradation. In this paper, we propose a methodology for determining PV degradation leveraging available modeled clear-sky irradiance data rather than site sensor data, and a robust year-over-year rate calculation. We show the method to provide reliable degradation rate estimates even in the case of sensor drift, data shifts, and soiling. Compared with alternate methods, we demonstrate that the proposed method delivers the lowest uncertainty in degradation rate estimates for a fleet of 486 PV systems.
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