EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Development of a GIS Tool for High Precision PV Degradation Monitoring and Supervision: Feasibility Analysis in Large and Small PV Plants

Miguel De Simón-Martín, Ana-María Diez-Suárez, Laura Álvarez- de Prado, Alberto González-Martínez, Álvaro De la Puente-Gil and Jorge Blanes-Peiró
Additional contact information
Miguel De Simón-Martín: Department Area of Electrical Engineering, School of Mines Engineering, University of León (Spain), Campus de Vegazana, S/N, 24071 León, Spain
Ana-María Diez-Suárez: Department Area of Electrical Engineering, School of Mines Engineering, University of León (Spain), Campus de Vegazana, S/N, 24071 León, Spain
Laura Álvarez- de Prado: Department Area of Topography, School of Mines Engineering, University of León (Spain), Campus de Vegazana, S/N, 24071 León, Spain
Alberto González-Martínez: Department Area of Electrical Engineering, School of Mines Engineering, University of León (Spain), Campus de Vegazana, S/N, 24071 León, Spain
Álvaro De la Puente-Gil: Department Area of Electrical Engineering, School of Mines Engineering, University of León (Spain), Campus de Vegazana, S/N, 24071 León, Spain
Jorge Blanes-Peiró: Department Area of Electrical Engineering, School of Mines Engineering, University of León (Spain), Campus de Vegazana, S/N, 24071 León, Spain

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 6, 1-29

Abstract: It is well known that working photovoltaic (PV) plants show several maintenance needs due to wiring and module degradation, mismatches, dust, and PV cell defects and faults. There are a wide range of theoretical studies as well as some laboratory tests that show how these circumstances may affect the PV production. Thus, it is mandatory to evaluate the whole PV plant performance and, then, its payback time, profitability, and environmental impact or carbon footprint. However, very few studies include a systematic procedure to quantify and supervise the real degradation effects and fault impacts on the field. In this paper, the authors first conducted a brief review of the most frequent PV faults and the degradation that can be found under real conditions of operation of PV plants. Then, they proposed and developed an innovative Geographic Information System (GIS) application to locate and supervise them. The designed tool was applied to both a large PV plant of 108 kWp and a small PV plant of 9 kWp installed on a home rooftop. For the large PV plant, 24 strings of PV modules were modelized and introduced into the GIS application and every module in the power plant was studied including voltage, current, power, series and parallel resistances, fill factor, normalized PV curve to standard test conditions (STC), thermography and visual analysis. For the small PV installation three strings of PV panels were studied identically. It must be noted that PV modules in this case included power optimizers. The precision of the study enabled the researchers to locate and supervise up to a third part of every PV cell in the system, which can be adequately georeferenced. The developed tool allows both the researchers and the investors to increase control of the PV plant performance, to lead to better planning of maintenance actuations, and to evaluate several PV module replacement strategies in a preventive maintenance program. The PV faults found include hot spots, snail tracks, ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) discoloration, PV cell fractures, busbar discoloration, bubbles and Si discoloration.

Keywords: photovoltaics; PV plants; PV faults; Geographic Information System; PV supervision and maintenance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/6/965/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/6/965/ (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:jsusta:v:9:y:2017:i:6:p:965-:d:100692

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

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

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:9:y:2017:i:6:p:965-:d:100692