PV Pro

DuraMAT 1.0 Project

Operational Field Studies

Category PV Field Data

Recipient LBNL (Technical Lead: Karin, Todd; PI: Jain, Anubhav)

Subs NREL; SLAC; SNL

Status Completed

Abstract Power production data is a rich resource for understanding photovoltaic (PV) degradation, but the full utility of the information hidden in this data has not yet been leveraged. Time-series data of deployed systems list the system operating current and voltage at a variety of temperatures and irradiance, from which new advanced data analytics techniques can extract detailed information on the electrical performance of the array. Recent work has suggested the exciting possibility to use maximum power point (MPP) production data to infer current voltage (I-V) curves, identify faults or estimate temperature coefficients. However, these promising initial results have not been rigorously validated, tested over diverse datasets or provided to the community in a standard broadly-applicable form. In many cases, further development is needed to standardize procedures such as data cleaning and analysis.

This project will develop pv-pro, an open-source software package for determining the time evolution of I-V parameters for a PV string using typical pv production data. This method will allow users to identify and quantify a diverse set of PV degradation modes, including potential induced degradation (PID), encapsulant discoloration and solder bond failure without time-consuming field surveys.