Assessment of solar irradiance in Large-Scale Photovoltaic fields by means of video processing

Photovoltaic (PV) technology has experienced rapid growth over the last 10 years. Although PV has positioned itself at the forefront of renewable energy technologies, further work needs to be done to improve energy efficiency. PV plants efficiency is considerably affected by partial shading originating in clouds and adjacent PV panels. The goal of this paper is to solve the problem of "Partial Shaded Large-Scale PV Plants". Utilizing already existing surveillance cameras, we estimate the solar irradiation of predefined grid in means of image processing. Based on this data, interpolation is performed to estimate the irradiation of each point in the PV field. We further process the data to estimate the position and velocity of shading objects such as clouds. The assessment of the irradiation could be further utilized to estimate the instantaneous power point of each PV panel. This knowledge could then be used to enhance the maximum power point of the field by using meandering methods. The characteristics of the shading objects could also be used to estimate future power drop of the field.