Modules can underperform for a variety of environmental and non-environmental factors. With good design and operation practices we can mitigate non-environmental factors. However, we cannot control the environment. We can only predict its behavior, and in turn verify or discount its effect on under-performance.
Why is this important for owners and financiers? Knowing the true risks and not just the average dictated by models will help identify the systems true performance potential, in both the system modeling and monitoring.
What are the main environmental drivers? There are a variety of unique attributes for each environmental factor. To simplify things, lets break it down into two categories:
Part 1 – The Sun’s potential
“Weather data” as it’s commonly called, can come from a variety of sources (NREL NSRDB, NASA, synthetic Meteonorm, various 3rd party satellite providers such as Solar Anywhere). This is used in a model as the basis for sun potential, and is the biggest contributor to the model’s performance. Many of these weather data files are compiled from various sources, and don’t always correlate directly to recent weather trends perfectly.
We can mitigate risk by understanding the weather confidence in our models. We can do this in 4 ways:
Who conducts this complicated test?
Pure Power has an Independent Engineering department that specializes in the running weather assessments, as well as PVSYST and historical assessments.
To reduce risk and save time & money on your next project, reach out to Pure Power at info@purepower.com