Automated Fixing Cost Estimation of Photovoltaic System Failures for the Creation of a Decision Support System

Abstract

The increasing focus on sustainability connected to extended lifetimes with guaranteed high energy yields in the photovoltaic (PV) sector brings new challenges in operating and maintaining PV systems. Additionally, as the PV Terawatt Age has been reached in 2022 and a sustained exponential PV deployment growth is expected, operation and maintenance (O&M) companies have an ever-increasing portfolio of PV plants to operate while maintaining cost competitive. Therefore, a shift from manual fault detection and solution toward smart and automated alternatives is required to keep downtime due to faults at a minimum while ensuring that PV systems can operate safely and efficiently. This work extends past developments of an automated O&M decision support system (DSS) by focusing on the automation of selecting and prioritizing solutions in case of PV system event/failure appearance. Thereby, the TRUST-PV Solution Matrix is added to the published TRUST-PV Risk Matrix, providing a standardized list of solutions for all events and failures which can appear in a PV system. Furthermore, the Cost Priority Number, a prioritization methodology to assess technical failures and their economic impact in energy systems, is improved by integrating automated fixing cost calculations into the DSS.