A Log-Logistic Predictor for Power Generation in Photovoltaic Systems

Guilherme Souza, Ricardo Santos and Erlandson Saraiva
Additional contact information
Guilherme Souza: College of Computing, Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Campo Grande 79070-900, Brazil
Ricardo Santos: College of Computing, Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Campo Grande 79070-900, Brazil
Erlandson Saraiva: Institute of Mathematics, Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Campo Grande 79070-900, Brazil

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 16, 1-16

Abstract: Photovoltaic (PV) systems are dependent on solar irradiation and environmental temperature to achieve their best performance. One of the challenges in the photovoltaic industry is performing maintenance as soon as a system is not working at its full generation capacity. The lack of a proper maintenance schedule affects power generation performance and can also decrease the lifetime of photovoltaic modules. Regarding the impact of environmental variables on the performance of PV systems, research has shown that soiling is the third most common reason for power loss in photovoltaic power plants, after solar irradiance and environmental temperature. This paper proposes a new statistical predictor for forecasting PV power generation by measuring environmental variables and the estimated mass particles (soiling) on the PV system. Our proposal was based on the fit of a nonlinear mixed-effects model, according to a log-logistic function. Two advantages of this approach are that it assumes a nonlinear relationship between the generated power and the environmental conditions (solar irradiance and the presence of suspended particulates) and that random errors may be correlated since the power generation measurements are recorded longitudinally. We evaluated the model using a dataset comprising environmental variables and power samples that were collected from October 2019 to April 2020 in a PV power plant in mid-west Brazil. The fitted model presented a maximum mean squared error (MSE) of 0.0032 and a linear coefficient correlation between the predicted and observed values of 0.9997 . The estimated average daily loss due to soiling was 1.4 % .

Keywords: log-logistic model; photovoltaic power plants; soiling mass particles; power generation estimate (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: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/16/5973/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/16/5973/ (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:15:y:2022:i:16:p:5973-:d:891103

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 ().