Assessing the modelling approach and datasets required for fault detection in photovoltaic systems
Author(s)
Acha Izquierdo, Salvador
Le Brun, N
Shah, N
Bird, M
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Reliable monitoring for photovoltaic assets (PVs) is essential to ensuring uptake, long term performance, and maximum return on investment of renewable systems. To this end this paper investigates the input data and machine learning techniques required for day-behind predictions of PV generation, within the scope of conducting informed maintenance of these systems. Five years of PV generation data at hourly intervals were retrieved from four commercial building-mounted PV installations in the UK, as well as weather data retrieved from MIDAS. A support vector machine, random forest and artificial neural network were trained to predict PV power generation. Random forest performed best, achieving an average mean relative error of 2.7%. Irradiance, previous generation and solar position were found to be the most important variables. Overall, this work shows how low-cost data driven analysis of PV systems can be used to support the effective management of such assets.
Date Issued
2019-11-28
Date Acceptance
2019-07-01
Citation
2019 IEEE Industry Applications Society Annual Meeting, 2019
Publisher
IEEE
Journal / Book Title
2019 IEEE Industry Applications Society Annual Meeting
Copyright Statement
© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Sainsbury's Supermarkets Ltd
Grant Number
CEPSE_P57236
Source
IEEE Industry Applications Society Annual Meeting
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Engineering, Industrial
Engineering
Fault detection
machine learning photovoltaics
random forest
weather data
POWER
PLANT
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2019-09-29
Finish Date
2019-10-03
Coverage Spatial
Baltimore, Maryland, USA