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The failure and degradation modes of about 5900 crystalline-Si glass/polymer modules fielded for six to 16 years in three different photovoltaic (PV) power plants with different mounting systems under the hot-dry desert climate of Arizona are evaluated. Based on the results of this evaluation, failure mode, effect, and criticality analysis, a statistical reliability tool that uses risk priority number is performed for each PV power plant to determine the dominant failure modes in the modules by means of ranking and prioritizing the modes. This study on PV power plants considers all the failure and degradation modes from both safety and performance perspectives and, thus, comes to the conclusion that solder bond fatigue/failure with/without gridline contact fatigue/failure is the most dominant failure/degradation mode for these module types in the hot-dry desert climate of Arizona. Index Terms-Failure mode, effect, and criticality analysis (FMECA), reliability, risk priority number (RPN), statistical.

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This paper provides a metric definition for the safety failures, reliability failures and degradation loss for the PV modules. These metrics are then used in real power plant evaluations to calculate the distribution among these three metrics which in turn could obj ectively be used to perform financial risk calculations. The results obtained on 2352 and 1280 modules in two of the evaluated power plants, aged 12 and 4 years, in a hot-dry desert climate are analyzed using these defined metrics. The results indicate that the mean and median degradations, respectively, are 0.95 and 0.96 %/year for the 12-year old, and 0.96%/year and 1 %/year for the 4-year old power plants. The distribution between safety failures, reliability failures and durability loss is determined to be 7%, 42%and 51 %, respectively for the 12 year old power plant.

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