Solar PV Performance Analysis: Step by Step Guide

Your phone rings and it’s the CEO… “George… why is solar site XYZ 10% below expected PR (performance ratio) last month and 8% below budgeted revenue for the last quarter...? That’s completely unacceptable! You have 24h to give me a full explanation with immediate corrective actions!”

Hopefully you weren’t just informed from the CEO’s call that the solar site was underperforming. Maybe you already saw the site was underperforming but didn’t quite know where to look or the actions you carried out didn’t increase the site performance.

Whatever the scenario this guide will allow you to put together an action plan to find and correct sources of underperformance on a solar PV asset, regardless of the size of the power plant.

The general process we will go through is as follows:

1. Check for data availability and correctness

2. Check for availability, ensuring inverters or strings are all producing

3. Check for sources of underperformance

4. Put together action plan with expected % performance increase for each action

In the next post we'll go through the first step in terms of what data is needed to check a site's performance.