Optimization of the operation and monitoring of large-scale photovoltaic power plant

Abstract: The monitoring and supervision of large scale solar photovoltaic plants becomes more and more important nowadays, with the increase of the installed power. The detection system and the reactivity must be improved in order to allow the plants to run at their best capacity. One way to improve that detection is the setup of alerts triggering for certain types of defaults concerning the performance of the inverters or the plant itself. That setup can be optimized by analytical analysis on the historic data of the plant, and adjusted for each plant, depending on its behavior. Another way is to calculate robust indicators such as the performance ratio, which corresponds to the efficiency of the plant, regardless the type of installed panels. This indicator depends on the electricity production and the received irradiance. In order to have an accurate measure of that indicator, a work on the reconstitution of the missing data must be done for the irradiance measure. That reconstitution enables to have access to a robust measure of the performance ratio and thus to improve the monitoring of the performances of the plant.