Solar Panel Fault Detection Using Machine Vision and Image Processing Technique

Solar Energy is one of the important source of clean energy and a proven reliable source for future advancement in energy management sector. The International Energy Agency- IEA published a report stating, the power generation through solar PV increased by 179 TWh in year 2021 a remarkable growth of 22% on 2020. In India the Solar power ranks second according to installation capacity of 66.7 GW. The solar fields spread over a large area covering land of Square Kilometer and acres, the photovoltaic panel are considered the crucial and act as main component for energy generation. The development and increasing demand of clean energy using solar energy leads to need of maintenance of such solar farms to avoid loss of generation capacity over time, loss of maintenance cost due to downtime for repair. This paper presents an image processing technique using python and its corresponding libraries, to identify the faulty photovoltaic panel. The results obtained from image processing technique was compared with the manual inspection and found to be satisfactory and the same can be implemented to solar farms in remote areas.