IV-Curve Regression for Operational Solar Plants Using Pulse Power Line Communication

While solar panels have been worldwidely used for decades, an increasing number of panels in operation suffer from degredations. Here, obtaining characteristics, e.g., IV-curve typically requires costly manual inspection. In this paper, we propose IV-Curve Regression (IVCR), a method to automatically fit the real IV-curve of a solar panel from the collected data in an operational solar plant, where maximum power tracking algorithm is applied. We evaluated IVCR using the data collected with pulse power line communications for PVs (PPLC-PV) on a real operational power plant of 3960 panels. The estimated IV-curves with IVCR for both normal and degraded panels could successfully best fit to the real-traced IV-curves with manual inspections. This indicates that IVCR can be used for large-scale operational power plants with PPLC-PV communications.