Plant Performance

Recent technology advances and improved industrial processes have made silicon heterojunction one of the most attractive PV technologies, helped by its inherent bifaciality, which offers among the highest levels of bifacial gain available. Researchers from CEA-INES and Eternalsun Spire explore the performance stability and measurement of bifacial heterojunction modules under real life conditions, benchmarking them against PERC modules as the industry workhorse.

Inverters are the leading source of corrective maintenance activity in PV power plants, yet independent testing to inform procurement decisions remains the exception rather than the norm. Michael Mills-Price and Jenya Meydbray of PVEL describe how a new inverter testing regime is seeking to set quality benchmarks for this increasingly critical part of the PV system.

Asset management practices must mature and standardise to keep pace with the rapidly accelerating deployment of solar. Ypatios Moysiadis, vice-chair of an industry group tasked with drawing up new best practice guidelines, explains how.

Anti-reflective coatings have been a standard technology on solar modules for some time, but several companies are now targeting the market for older solar farms. Sara Verbruggen reports on the promising early results from trials of these performance-boosting technologies.

India has become the world’s second largest market for trackers as it chases its ambition of installing 100GW of solar by 2022. Geoffrey S. Kinsey, Madhusudan Partani, Mukund Kulkarni, Brijit Shetty, Rubin Sidhu and Jie Zhang report on efforts to better understand the performance benefits of trackers over fixed-tilt mountings

Light- and elevated temperature-induced degradation – LeTID – is emerging as a potentially serious problem affecting PV modules employing PERC technology. So why isn’t the industry more aware of it, ask Radovan Kopecek, Joris Libal and Lejo J. Koduvelikulathu of ISC Konstanz.

Solar O&M is rapidly evolving as PV deployment gathers pace worldwide. Guillermo Oviedo Hernández, Elena Bernardi and Jörn Carstensen of SolarPower Europe’s O&M Task Force look at some of the emerging trends, practices and business models in this increasingly critical arm of the solar industry.

Solar farm operators are coming under growing pressure to help maintain network stability by providing accurate generation forecasts. As Dr. Nick Engerer (CTO of Solcast) writes, innovations in short-term solar forecasting are providing operators with new options for making this task less of a distraction from their core business.

Cell cracks have been identified as a major cause of defects in PV modules, but their effect on performance is less well understood. Researchers Claudia Buerhop-Lutz, Thilo Winkler, Jens Hauch, Christian Camus and Christoph J. Brabec describe the results of ongoing investigations into how the electrical power of PV modules is impacted by cracking

Technologies purporting to alleviate performance losses in PV modules due to soiling from dust and other airborne particles are becoming more widely available. But do they work? Elisabeth Klimm and Karl-Anders Weiß of Fraunhofer ISE investigate