PV System Predictive Maintenance: Challenges, Current Approaches, and Opportunities

Abstract

Within the United States solar energy industry, there is a general motto of “set it and forget it” with solar energy. This notion is derived from much of the research and reliability studies around the photovoltaic (PV) panels themselves, not necessarily the PV system as a whole (including the inverter and other components). This implies that maintenance and regular monitoring is not needed. Yet many things can go wrong to cause the actual performance to deviate from the expected performance. If failures and/or unanticipated degradation issues go undetected, they will lead to reduced energy generation (and associated electricity credits) and/or potential loss of component warranty because of manufacturer turnover. Given the size of the problem and gaps with current solutions, the authors propose that PV system owners need an unbiased third-party off-the-shelf system-level predictive maintenance tool to optimize return-on-investment and minimize time to warranty claim in PV installations. This paper reviews the literature highlighting challenges, current approaches, and opportunities for PV predictive maintenance. The paper concludes with a call to action for establishing a collaborative agenda toward prioritizing PV predictive maintenance.

Definition of the Future Skills Needs of Job Profiles in the Renewable Energy Sector

“…For that purpose, predictive maintenance is an ever-growing strategy within the renewable energy sector to minimize O&M (operations and maintenance) cost [33]. In addition to DT, AI, Big Data, machine learning, and IoT are used in the renewable energy sector to analyze and monitor real-time data gathered by sensors [33][34][35][36]. Modeling equipment behavior leads to early detection of damage, performance tracking, operation optimization, and the prevention of failures and inefficiencies [33].…”

Review of Operation and Maintenance Methodologies for Solar Photovoltaic Microgrids

“…Remedial actions are performed to forecast and are recommended when maintenance procedures necessary to deal with any incipient failure or fault condition are observed (Li et al,2016). This observation is centered on thorough, continuous, and regular monitoring, supervision, forecast, and performance data on historical performance and anomalies for analysis of the SPV plant (Bosman et al, 2020). The key is in identifying hidden anomalies and irregularities before the next circuit testing or thermal imaging inspection which indicate upcoming component or system failures or underperformance (e.g., at PV modules, inverters, combiner boxes, trackers etc.)…”

“…These models are there to ensure proper enforcement and implementation of the O&M strategy in-place while presenting and evaluating criteria for success or failure. Executing O&M can be done through different options, such as Third party O&M company or inhouse, which are referred to as maintenance management models (Bosman et al, 2020;Solar Power Europe [SPE] 2018).…”

A Review of Control Techniques in Photovoltaic Systems

“…Each article focuses on a particular study objective, generally addressing topics at a single hierarchical level. The reviews associated with the first level were presented in [100][101][102][103], while in [102][103][104][105] the reviews of the controllers located at the second level are addressed and the reviews that study control topics at the third level are developed in [106][107][108][109][110]. In special cases the study objective has been approached at two levels.…”