Detection of Suboptimal Conditions in Photovoltaic Installations for Household-Prosumers

Advancements in photovoltaics and information technology makes it possible for cities to produce a fraction, if not everything, of the electrical power they require. Power generation in cities can be mainly achieved by photovoltaic installations located in the roofs of houses and buildings unevenly distributed among large areas. Suboptimal conditions such as soling, partial shadowing and electrical faults, are common in PV installations, decreasing their efficiency. It is advisable to detect when these suboptimal conditions occur to correct them and improve the overall performance of the PV installation. Nevertheless, the majority of suboptimal-detection techniques reported in the literature only consider large PV systems, neglecting rooftop PV installations. In this paper a low-cost embedded system suitable for detecting suboptimal conditions in small PV installation is presented. This system was validated for the detection of partial shadow that may occur due to strange objects in a specific region of the PV array. The system obtained a sensitivity of 87%, specificity of 87.9% and accuracy of 87.6%.