Investigation and Diagnosis of Lightning Strikes Affects Solar Cell Damage in Solar Farm

The 8MW solar farm is located in northern Thailand. The solar farm is divided into 8 substation units (SUs), each unit is 1MW/substation. The solar farm was struck by lightning at night, then the solar modules of SUs no. 1 and 5 were damaged approximately 4,209 modules and unable to generate electricity. Inspections and diagnostics were conducted under obtained data and engineering conditions such as the design of a solar farm, lightning protection system, etc. It was found that the lightning protection design was incomplete. In this paper, we propose a solar module damage diagnosis, destruction mechanism, overvoltage test, and ETS lightning protection guidelines.