Performance Metrics for Photovoltaic 4.0 Systems: 27.5 kW Solar Station as an Example

Photovoltaic energy has a growing market in the Egyptian economy. Egypt is investing efforts to support both national and international companies to have a share of this growth. With the installation of large stations, monitoring station performance becomes a tedious job, and so several companies supplied smart solutions to the monitoring issue. One of the interesting solutions is the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) to collect current-voltage readings, or IV curves, and then analyze them to detect operational faults. In this regard, we provide a case study of a developed system to monitor the performance of solar panels that can detect faults at the panel level. We provide insights about basic concerns for the performance of sensors that collect IVs and how the development of these sensors, which we call "characterizers," must take these quality metrics into consideration to be successfully able to detect operation faults at the panel level. Our work is based on two collected datasets for two different versions of characterizers, and we show how comparing real measurements against modeled measurements can detect faults.