Assessment of economic impact and management techniques of fault modes on photovoltaic systems

The knowledge of an adequate risk management is vital at the time of making investments, especially in the photovoltaic (PV) industry, where this issue is currently under development. Therefore, to achieve with the objective of managing the risk, one must have knowledge of the different faults, which can be organized by means of a failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) and, classified by the same, according to several criteria, such as occurrence, time to detection, time to repair and/or replace and impact on the whole system and energy production. Crossing this information with economic data, fault modes can be ranked with an overall weighted cost. The ranked fault modes are used by a maintenance plan to reduce the overall cost and guide the asset management. This paper proposes a methodology to quantify the economic impact of faults experienced in a photovoltaic power system and how can maintenance plans might mitigate these costs.