Plant Performance

With extreme weather events becoming increasingly common, Molly Lempriere takes a look at how to ensure a solar installation is prepared to manage wind, hail, heat and anything else nature has in store.

The cost of insuring operational solar farms has skyrocketed over the course of the year, triggered by carriers rethinking their approaches to natural catastrophes and other extreme weather events. This has placed additional importance on mitigation strategies. Kevin Christy, COO for North America at Lightsource bp, details how the solar developer has adapted its strategy in the field.

As it matures, the solar industry is moving beyond the use of Performance Ratios (PR) as the go-to performance metric for operational sites. Christopher West, head of central engineering - solar PV delivery unit at Statkraft, argues the case for PRs to be replaced by alternative, more evolved methods of assessment.

Given the significant wealth of data available from an energy generation asset today, it’s perhaps easy to overlook the availability and value from around the asset as well. Katie Applebaum, business development manager at Clir Renewables, explains why this ‘data disarray’ is preventing solar assets from reaching their full potential.

As solar continues to proliferate and the very first large-scale arrays exceed 10 years of operational life, the value of operations and maintenance services is forecast to skyrocket. But as Edith Hancock writes, industry pressures such as new technologies and consolidation, are reshaping the industry.

Bifaciality and trackers have become almost synonymous with modern plant design, but modelling gains in a real-world environment is notoriously difficult. Liam Stoker reports from a panel at the Solar Finance & Investment Europe conference which explored how new technologies are driving yield upside.

The advancement of solar cell and module technology has meant ever larger, higher power modules are being manufactured, shipped and installed at increasing speeds, placing renewed importance on product testing and inspection. Here, Enertis explores the role of electroluminescence inspection throughout the lifespan of a PV project.

Mark Osborne analyses the sixth instalment of PV Evolution Labs’ annual module rankings and the insights it offers into the state of PV reliability and performance as technological change continues apace.

Despite the importance of reliability to the cost competitiveness of PV, large data sets enabling high-level investigation of the technology’s performance in the field are relatively scarce. Dirk C. Jordan, Chris Deline, Bill Marion and Teresa Barnes of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Mark Bolinger of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study a unique data set of 100,000 PV systems in the US, drawing out tips for better reliability that have relevance to other parts of the world.

Many of the bifacial modules now offered by PV manufacturers employ bifacial passivated emitter and rear cell (PERC+) technology, making them vulnerable to rear-side potential-induced degradation, in addition to the conventional front-side shunting type (PID-s). Kai Sporleder, Volker Naumann, Stephan Großer, Marko Turek and Christian Hagendorf of the Fraunhofer Centre for Silicon Photovoltaics report on new testing methods designed to quantify the expected power PID-related losses in bifacial PERC+ modules in the field.