Fault Detection AI For Solar Panels

Abstract: The increased usage of solar panels worldwide highlights the importance of being able to detect faults in systems that use these panels. In this project, the historical power output (kWh) from solar panels combined with meteorological data was used to train a machine learning model to predict the expected power output of a given solar panel system. Using the expected power output, a comparison was made between the expected and the actual power output to analyze if the system was exposed to a fault. The result was that when applying the explained method an expected output could be created which closely resembled the actual output of a given solar panel system with some over- and undershooting. Consequentially, when simulating a fault (50% decrease of the power output), it was possible for the system to detect all faults if analyzed over a two-week period. These results show that it is possible to model the predicted output of a solar panel system with a machine learning model (using meteorological data) and use it to evaluate if the system is producing as much power as it should be. Improvements can be made to the system where adding additional meteorological data, increasing the precision of the meteorological data and training the machine learning model on more data are some of the options.