Photovoltaic (PV) plant failures have a significant influence on PV plant security, reliability, and energy balance. Energy losses produced by a PV plant are due to two large causes: failures and inefficiencies. Knowing the relative influence of energy losses due to failures and energy losses due to inefficiencies on the PV plant energy balance contribute to the optimization of its design, commissioning, and maintenance tasks. This paper estimates the failure rates, grouped by components, and the relative impact of the failures on the PV plant energy balance through real operation and maintenance follow-up data of 15 PV plants in Spain and Italy for 15 months. Results show that the influence of failures in energy losses of all analysed PV plants is low, reaching a maximum value of 0.96% of the net energy yield. Solar field energy losses only represent 4.26% of all failure energy losses. On the other hand, energy losses due to inefficiencies have represented between 22.34% and 27.58% of the net energy yield.

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Industrial activity concerned with the profitability and safety of investments can be supported and promoted by research through the creation of new mathematical modeling approaches, and the quantification and mitigation of uncertainties. In recent years there has been increasing interest in the adoption of probabilistic approaches to assess sources of uncertainty in solar energy systems to estimate their feasibility, considering yield estimates, investments, operation and maintenance costs, and solar resource. In this context, the synthetic solar irradiance data set approach emerges as a promising tool to emulate the variability inherent to the solar resource in confident designs and feasibility analyses of these systems. Chapter 5 deals with the requirements of the industry with respect to synthetic solar data, and how such requirements are currently addressed during the main stages of development of solar projects. We recap methods for benchmarking the success of generated synthetic irradiance, reviewing statistical indicators for that purpose. We discuss and compare the use of single annual and multiple synthetic annual data sets of solar irradiance in the first stages of solar projects, and present their uses in a case study application in a Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant with a similar configuration to a well-known operational Parabolic Trough (PT) plant located in Spain.