Case studies on system availability of PVP plants in Thailand

Abstract

Analysis of the system availability (SA) of commercial utility-scale PV power (PVP) plants is important for the development, planning, and the financial assessment of the long-term operation of the plants. Many previous studies were done to analyse SA but these were mainly for plants located in non-tropical climatic and environmental conditions. In this study, six utility-scale PVP plants in the central region of Thailand were selected for case studies. The case studies first aimed to evaluate failures of PVP plant operations. Root causes and solutions to these failures were then identified. Based on the five-year data collected from the case studies, an initial modelling analysis was conducted to forecast and to attain better SA values of new PVP systems. However, more mathematical analysis based more sample operating plants with longer data period needs to be done to allow the use of a mathematical model for projecting the SA of proposed PVP plants and for it to be useful too in the financial assessments of the new PVP plants.

Keywords

• System availability
• Performance ratio
• Utility-scale
• Photovoltaic power plant
• Failure