PV module loss analysis using system in-situ monitoring data

Outdoor PV module monitoring has been widely applied for fault detection and degradation analysis of today's PV systems. As the monitoring resolution increases, module-level I-V tracing becomes more common, which allows the in-situ monitoring of PV module level performance during system operation. In this work, we present a method to store and process the in-situ monitoring data for an outdoor PV system. OSIsoft PI system is used for data storage and organizing. Self-developed algorithms are implemented in Python for data extraction and processing. The power loss on different mechanisms are evaluated then calculated from 62 of the module level I-V tracers. The method proposed in this work can be very useful for degradation analysis of PV modules and systems.