PVPRO: Methods for Determining Photovoltaic Degradation from Maximum Power Production Data

DuraMAT is developing PVPRO, an open-source software package for determining the time evolution of I-V parameters for a photovoltaic (PV) string using typical maximum power data. This method will allow users to identify a diverse set of PV degradation modes without time-consuming field surveys.

Power production data is a rich resource for understanding photovoltaic (PV) degradation, but the full power 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 data sets 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.

To learn more about PVPRO, see GitHub.