Technical specifications and quality control procedures for reducing the uncertainty in PV installations: results of the FP7 project PVCROPS

PVCROPS (PhotoVoltaic Cost r€duction, Reliability, Operational performance, Prediction and Simulation) is a project within the European Framework Programme 7 whose objectives are: improving the performance, reliability and lifetime of PV systems; reducing the cost of PV systems; and enhancing the integration of PV into the grid. The main way to reduce the initial costs of a PV installation involves an optimal design and subsequent construction. As a consequence, this optimization leads to a higher performance and to a lower levelized cost of electricity from PV. PVCROPS Work Package 2 and Work Package 9 have been conceived to achieve some of these objectives by proposing both an optimization of the design, to avoid undesirable initial mistakes that can make more expensive the cost of the installation, and a quality control of PV systems, to ensure the final installation matches the one designed initially and that it is able to overcome production requirements. This paper presents one of the main results of these work packages: a document that reflects the accumulated experience in the field by the PVCROPS team about actual PV installations and which contains, first, a general proposal of technical specifications for grid-connected PV systems and, second, the corresponding quality control procedures to check if the installation fulfills the technical specifications previously established. This document has also a report about a comparison between available PV energy performance models and a proposal about how to face the hot-spot problem within commercial frameworks.