Vulcano 80 kW photovoltaic plant technology assessment: more than 20 years of performance evaluation and experience

pubblicazioni - Memoria

Vulcano 80 kW photovoltaic plant technology assessment: more than 20 years of performance evaluation and experience

pubblicazioni - Memoria

Vulcano 80 kW photovoltaic plant technology assessment: more than 20 years of performance evaluation and experience

The work deals with recent measurements at Vulcano PV plant and with their comparison to related ones, collected periodically during the 21 years of plant operation.

This work offers remarkable information on PV modules and array performance through the years and on their degradation during the lifetime. The comparison of measurements on module’s nominal power resulted in an average decrease of about 6%, after 22 years of their manufacture. Likewise, the analysis of array strings nominal power resulted in an average decrease lower than 4 %, allowing stating that, after more the 20 years of operation, the power degradation of Vulcano PV array is not remarkable. Then, it results evident that Vulcano PV plant performance, after more than 20 years of its installation, is still considerably good. The Vulcano plant history successfully demonstrates the effectiveness of PV technology and let to assess that PV module lifetime can be estimate much longer than 20 years.