Reliability and Performance of Photovoltaic Systems

IEA PVPS Task 13 engages in focusing the international collaboration in improving the reliability of photovoltaic systems and subsystems by collecting, analyzing and disseminating information on their technical performance and durability, providing a basis for their technical assessment, and developing practical recommendations for improving their electrical and economic output in different climatic regions.

Objectives

The overall objectives of Task 13 are to:

Provide a common platform to summarize and report on technical aspects affecting the quality, performance, and reliability of PV modules and systems in a wide variety of environments and applications.
Gather modelled and measured data from different PV systems from around the world. This will include summaries of different practices from each country, experiences with a variety of PV technologies and system designs.
Disseminate Task 13 results and communicate to our stakeholders in a number of impactful ways including reports, workshops, webinars, and web content.

Expertise

Task 13 experts will continue to provide a unique and fundamental analysis of PV components, modules and systems, including new applications such as floating PV and agricultural PV, affecting the reliability and performance of PV systems over their lifetime. With a strong technical focus, the broad global expert participation will enable Task outcomes relevant for stakeholders from PV research and industry. It will contribute to technology requirements, risk mitigation and standardization.

Outreach

The quality of Task 13 reports and Task 13 workshops stems from the continued participation of highly motivated PV experts in the field. Like the development of long-term databases for degradation and performance analyses, the collaboration established in previous years will be beneficial to reach out to specific target audiences, e.g., webinar on relevant failure modes in PV applications for PV planning offices, PV testing equipment developers, testing companies, and workshop on digital twinning of PV power plants for asset managers, EPCs and O&M .

Task 13’s current phase began in 2022, ends in 2025 and activities are organized as follows

1Subtask 1 Reliability of Novel PV Materials, Components and Modules

This subtask addresses the following objectives:

Investigate PV module degradation modes of new PV technologies and new materials and designs required for advanced PV modules to derive the most appropriate testing methods and mitigation strategies.
Review of repair methods for PV modules in terms of efficiency and long-term stability. We will examine and discuss current best practices and technical challenges for reliability testing, sorting and quality/safety control of second-life PV modules and evaluate the cost implications.
Provide a global survey of technical efforts aimed to improve testing strategies and significance of tests. This will include tests for emerging PV applications with specific load .
Review of performance, degradation and lifetime estimation of PV plus battery systems and develop an O&M strategy for PV plus battery systems.

2Subtask 2 Performance and Durability of PV Applications

This subtask addresses the following objectives:

Provide an overview on different floating PV applications as well as on their performance loss mechanism and stress factors. We will investigate energy yield models for FPV systems and discuss O&M challenges and best practice for FPV.
Focus on the emerging PV application of agrivoltaics, particular from the perspectives of field performance, durability and reliability. We will share insights on field experience on O&M concepts for specific agrivoltaic systems.
Provide a global survey of PV tracking technologies, tracking algorithms and how they improve bifacial PV performance in different regions, climates and system designs. We will compare different performance modelling and simulation approaches and collect information on international standardisation efforts for bifacial PV tracking systems.
Review of digital integration and digital twinning approaches within the PV sector that facilitate the planning, construction, O&M of PV plants. We will focus on communication with PV plant periphery, digital integration of PV plant data throughout their lifetime, digital twinning for design and O&M concepts and the integration of additional data sources.
Investigate the performance of Module Level Power Electronics (MLPE) in partial shaded PV systems. We will compare the annual performance of MLPE and standard PV string inverters as well as other advantages and disadvantages, manpower of planning, installation, service and durability for both, MLPE and PV string inverters.

3Subtask 3 Techno-Economic Key Performance Indicators

This subtask addresses the following objectives:

Provide a global overview of extreme weather events that impact PV systems, including hurricanes, typhoons, blizzards, hailstorms, dust storms, wildfires, etc., and losses/damage associated with them. We will summarize opportunities to employ new designs and materials to increase system resilience to extreme weather events .
Provide insights into climate specific PV module/system deficiencies and strategies for the optimisation of system yield and lifetime. We will derive best practices and define guidelines in terms of best technology combination.
Focus on the impacts of decisions along the value chain of a PV projects (i.e. during design, procurement, engineering, transport, installation, O&M, end of life) to define best practice flowcharts for PV projects and contribute towards reducing the risk of PV investments.
Using the bottom-up information from the results above, we will focused on the mapping of the techno-economic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and thus on the visualization of performance related data to provide benchmarks for the PV sector.

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