Economic evaluation of maintenance strategies for ground-mounted solar photovoltaic plants

Abstract

In this paper we present a generic model which evaluates the economic viability of alternative maintenance strategies for differently sized photovoltaic plants with variable components. We thoroughly review the existing literature on reliability, maintenance and maintenance strategies for PV plants. The model is applied to ground-mounted solar PV plants of three different sizes: 1, 10, and 100 MWp. The analysis compares immediate corrective maintenance with maintenance strategies of different periodicity (weekly, biweekly , and monthly). Simulations take the driving time of the service team and the operation of a spare parts inventory into account. We further analyze the impact of hourly spot prices in contrast to constant prices (feed-in tariffs). We find that corrective maintenance is the most cost-effective strategy. If the service journey takes six hours instead of one hour, corrective maintenance becomes more expensive than weekly periodic maintenance. For a three-hour journey, the size of the PV plant matters. If corrective maintenance is adopted, the establishing of a spare parts inventory should be considered. When volatile hourly spot prices are considered, we find that opportunity costs are lowest (highest) when service teams operate at 8 pm (8 am), irrespective of the day of the week, whereas maintenance events scheduled for Wednesdays at 8 am or 2 pm are, given current EPEX spot prices, the most cost-effective in terms of total costs.

Identification and Analysis of Impact Factors on the Economic Feasibility of Photovoltaic Energy Investments

“…Table 3 shows a summary of the impact factors identified, the classification in which they were included, the references, and the total number of times they were found in the articles. 190,191,193,196,[199][200][201][202]214,216] -175,177,179,180,183,185,186,188-193,195,196,198-200, 202,204,206,207 Operation and maintenance time [17,19,37,44,51,52,56,64,69,70,76,77,90,98,104,106,116,118,127,130,131,136,145,148,154,165,166,173,175,186,193,195,196 Azimuth and angle of incidence are the angles formed between the projection of the sun's rays and the earth's surface, and vary according to the movement of the sun. These angles should serve as a reference in the assembly and installation of the PV panels, to maximiz...…”

“…In general, maintenance is divided into preventive and corrective maintenance. According to Peters and Madlener [106], the objective of the first is to maintain the functionality of an item and avoid failures beforehand, while the second happens after the occurrence of a failure and restores the functionality of the item.…”

Modeling the wasted value of data in maintenance investments

“…Common ways to present the failure probability functions are e.g. Weibull distributions for agerelated failures (Nguyen & Chou, 2018;Sarker & Faiz, 2016), and exponential functions for constant failure rates (Peters & Madlener, 2017). In this paper we pursue a more general model to support the…”

Optimizing PV-Hosting Capacity with the Integrated Employment of Dynamic Line Rating and Voltage Regulation

“…A record 175 GW of solar PV was added in 2021 which is well over the half of total RES addition in 2021 [4]. There are three types of solar PV installations: ground-mounted PV [6], floating PV [7], and rooftop PV [8]. In recent years, electrical networks have opened access to the public, and that resulted in the rapid development of rooftop PV system installations.…”