Long-term performance analysis of CIGS thin-film PV modules

Neelkanth G. Dhere; Ashwani Kaul; Shirish A. Pethe

doi:10.1117/12.893864

21 September 2011 Long-term performance analysis of CIGS thin-film PV modules

Neelkanth G. Dhere, Ashwani Kaul, Shirish A. Pethe

Proceedings Volume 8112, Reliability of Photovoltaic Cells, Modules, Components, and Systems IV; 81120R (2011) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.893864
Event: SPIE Solar Energy + Technology, 2011, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Current accelerated qualification tests of photovoltaic (PV) modules mostly assist in avoiding infant mortality but can neither duplicate changes occurring in the field nor can predict useful lifetime. Therefore, outdoor monitoring of fielddeployed thin-film PV modules was undertaken at FSEC with goals of assessing their performance in hot and humid climate under high system voltage operation and to correlate the PV performance with the meteorological parameters. Significant and comparable degradation rate of -5.13% and -4.5% per year was found by PV USA type regression analysis for the positive and negative strings respectively of 40W glass-to-glass CIGS thin-film PV modules in the hot and humid climate of Florida. With the current-voltage measurements it was found that the performance degradation within the PV array was mainly due to a few (8-12%) modules having a substantially high degradation. The remaining modules within the array continued to show reasonable performance (>96% of the rated power after ~ 4years).

Citation Download Citation

Neelkanth G. Dhere, Ashwani Kaul, and Shirish A. Pethe "Long-term performance analysis of CIGS thin-film PV modules", Proc. SPIE 8112, Reliability of Photovoltaic Cells, Modules, Components, and Systems IV, 81120R (21 September 2011); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.893864

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