Have you checked your PV system?

(Bild borttagen) If you have a newly installed PV system on your villa roof, you should want to know if it performs as expected. At the 8th World-Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion (WCPEC-8) which was held in Milano in September 2022, Markus Rinio from Karlstad University presented a general solution to check the performance of a PV system without having own weather sensors. The solution is implemented in an easy-to-use software for MS Windows. It is based on a comparison of the measured power curve of one sunny day with a simulated one. Such power curves can be exported by the inverter of the PV system. The outcome is the actual system peak performance.

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Typically, people nowadays compare the PV yield from a year with the prediction of the installer to find out if the system works as it should. “The advantage of our solution is that you do not have to wait for a long time. A simple sunny day is enough to get a first indication about the performance of the PV system. This allows for faster reaction times in case of malfunctions.”, says Markus Rinio. The software PVcheck [1] is free and can be downloaded on https://pvcheck.hotell.kau.se/.

[1] M. Rinio, ‘PVcheck—A Software to Check Your Photovoltaic System’, Energies, vol. 14, no. 20, Art. no. 20, Jan. 2021, doi: 10.3390/en14206757.