Study of degradation of a grid connected photovoltaic system

Performance of photovoltaic (PV) systems degrades due to the technology and the operating conditions. The degradation of is one of the key indicators for reliability assessment of a PV system. This paper presents a degradation study of the grid connected PV system located in the campus of the University of Salento. A comparative analysis of actual and theoretical output power is carried out over a monitoring period of five years. PVsyst software is chosen to simulate the output power using actual meteorological data. The hourly expected power generation index is introduced to investigate on degradation and reliability.