Outdoor Experimental Laboratory for Long-Term Estimation of Photovoltaic-Plant Performance

This paper describes an outdoor experimental laboratory that has been developed to estimate the performance of photovoltaic (PV) plants in operating conditions. The laboratory includes ten different plants and a data acquisition system that has been specifically conceived to monitor the actual behavior of the plants. The main goals of this laboratory are the comparison among the performance indexes of different PV technologies and the long-term drift estimation of the specifications of the plant components. In this paper, the first results that refer to a time interval of nine months are reported, which allow a comparison among the monitored PV plants to be performed. A description of the data-acquisition system is also provided by focusing attention toward its metrological management, which allows traceable results to be obtained that are qualified in terms of measurement uncertainty.