Assessment of PV Plant Monitoring System by Means of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Photovoltaic (PV) plant monitoring is recently representing an important field in the energy market, due to the large diffusion of PV plants, often built with low technical standards in the past decade and lack of accuracy in O&M activities after the first 5-year life of the plant. In this paper, the authors proposed an expert system that, based on the image integration obtained by means of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), is able to identify some defects in PV modules and to analyze from an economical point the impact of these defects.