Regular and Irregular Performance Variation of Module String and Occurred Conditions for Potential Induced Degradation-Affected Crystalline Silicon Photovoltaic Power Plants

Jingsheng Huang, Yaojie Sun, He Wang and Junjun Zhang
Additional contact information
Jingsheng Huang: School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
Yaojie Sun: School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
He Wang: MOE Key Laboratory for Nonequilibrium Synthesis and Modulation of Condensed Matter, School of Science, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China
Junjun Zhang: State Key Laboratory of Operation and Control of Renewable Energy & Storage Systems, China Electric Power Research Institute, Nanjing 210003, China

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 22, 1-13

Abstract: Potential induced degradation (PID) leads to power degradation, and reduces durability and reliability of solar modules. However, this problem has not been thoroughly solved so far. The results from interlaboratory and field study show contradictory fault phenomenon for PID. In this paper, PID of crystalline silicon photovoltaic power plants distributed in various climate conditions was investigated. These photovoltaic power plants consist of two types of crystalline silicon solar modules, which cover almost all kinds of front glass, ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA) and backsheet available commercially. It was found that only a few of power plants were affected by PID. By measuring current voltage characteristics of PID-affected solar modules, the real faults phenomenon was uncovered and classified into regular and irregular power degradation in a module string. The results obtained in this work show that the negative potential caused by high system voltage and stacking faults are necessary and sufficient conditions for PID occurrence for the first time. The anomalous power degradation is related to the stacking fault, which appears randomly during the crystal growth.

Keywords: solar module; power degradation; crystalline silicon; potential induced degradation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/22/4230/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/22/4230/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:12:y:2019:i:22:p:4230-:d:284096

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().