Modeling Snow Losses in Photovoltaic Systems

To achieve accurate PV energy yield assessments for cold climate locations where snowfalls can lead to significant power losses in the wintertime, improvement and validation of snow loss modeling is necessary. In this paper we introduce a snow depth dependent clearing rate coefficient in the Marion snow loss model to account for the effect of different snow conditions on the natural snow clearing process. To evaluate the model, seven roof mounted PV plants with two different system configurations are analyzed. For both system configurations the snow depth dependent clearing rate coefficient yields lower error in the total modeled snow loss and capture climatic variations between locations better compared to the standard constant coefficient.