Measurement of the I(V) characteristics of photovoltaic arrays by the capacitive load method for fault detection

Photovoltaic power plants are more and more numerous all over the planet. In France, profit of PV power plants is done by a fixed buying back price of electricity. Until year 2020 the repurchase price of electricity will be constant, then variability of electricity will begin. Thus, to keep PV power plant profitable, a new management model is necessary. This model includes resource prediction, fault detection and management of maintenance and servicing to maximize energy production. This paper focus only on the fault detection. In a first part, we present I(V) tracers with some original characteristics (2 quadrant measurements, simplicity and almost insensitive to environmental parameters). Then, we focus on electrical signatures of PV array defaults. Finally, we conclude this paper with the perspective of a full fault detection system in PV power plant.