Definition and Computation of the Degradation Rates of Photovoltaic Systems of Different Technologies With Robust Principal Component Analysis

Grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems have become a significant constituent of the power supply mix. A challenge faced by both users and suppliers of PV systems is that of defining and computing a reliable metric of annual degradation rate while in service. This paper defines a new measure to calculate the degradation rate of PV systems from the PV field measured performance ratio (PR). At first, the PR time series is processed by conventional principal component analysis, which yields seasonality as the dominant data feature. The environment, operating conditions, uncertainty, and hardware used for monitoring influence the outdoor measurements unpredictably. These influences are viewed as perturbations that render the dominant feature obtained by PCA unsuitable to be used in a degradation rate definition. Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) is proposed to alleviate these effects. The new measure is defined as the area enclosed by the time series of the corrected by the RPCA annual monthly PR values. The degradation rates obtained for different technologies are compared with those obtained in previous studies. The results have shown that the degradation rates estimated by RPCA were in good agreement with previous investigations and provided increased confidence due to mitigation of uncertainty.