Temporary Performance Degradation of Photovoltaic Street Light in Kupang City, Nusa Tenggara Timur Province, Indonesia

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of dust to the performance degradation of PV street lights deployed at several areas (coastal, urban, industry, and village) in Kupang city. Results showed that maximum power output (Pmax) of all modules decreased by 9 % to 14 %. Short circuit current (Isc) was the parameter strongly affected by dust compared to open circuit voltage (Voc). Performance of the PV modules increased back to their initial conditions after cleaning. This was indicated by the increasing of Isc and Voc of the modules that leading to the escalating of their Pmax values. The worst effect of dust was exhibited by PV modules installed at coastal area. A simple analysis revealed that the module would lose 87.75 Wh of energy d–1. This study suggested that dust derating factor applied for PV street light design in Kupang should be higher than the standard (5 %).

Analysis of various degradations of five years aged mono c-Si, poly c-Si, and thin-film photovoltaic modules from rooftop solar installations in Dhaka’s tropical wet and dry climate conditions

“…Some of these degradations lead to visible changes in the module and can be detected by visual inspection of the module without doing any electrical characterization of the module (Meena et al, 2022). The images of the various visual degradations observed in our investigation are given in Figure 2, which are inline with other visual degradation studies in literature (Menoufi et al, 2017;Ingenhoven et al, 2019;Tanesab et al, 2020;Meena et al, 2022). For instance, large visible cracks (Figure 2A), discoloration (Figure 2B), glass degradation and front-side delamination (Figure 2C), moisture and dust accumulation (Figure 2D), snail tracks (Figure 2E), and a minor cracks (Figure 2F).…”