ABSTRACT
Solar photovoltaic (PV) modules are exposed to outdoor environment throughout the year. This makes it all the more important to evaluate the performance of PV systems under actual field operating conditions. It is quite true for installations that exist either in the developed or in the developing countries, for example in Germany. Meteocontrol is an accredited German-based company, which undertook a massive exercise of reviewing the field performance of about 30,000 installations across the European region and found a very startling observation that around 80% of the systems were underperforming. This was also reported in the New York Times dated 28 May 2013. The era of PV grid power generation started in India in 2010 under the ambit of Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM). This shows that Indian MW scale programme is still in its nascent stages and thus relatively new. Little information is available on such types of systems. However, a few organizations – Resolve Consultants, Chennai, and the one commissioned by the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) in 2012 – have studied the field performance of MW-capacity PV-grid power systems. The following section gives a brief insight into the key observations as recorded from these select few organizational pursuits through real-time monitoring of the PV power plants from various key elemental considerations.
