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Ares(2023)6940930 - 12/10/2023

DELIVERABLE 4.5
TASK 4.4.1

REPORT

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation
Programme under grant agreement N952957. The information reflects only the project’s view
and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Progressive revamping and repowering

of utility scale PV plants
October 2023
Project Title: Increase Friendly Integration of Reliable PV plants considering different market segments

Project Acronym: Trust-PV

Deliverable Title: Progressive revamping and repowering of utility scale PV plants

Lead beneficiaries: BayWa r.e. Operation Services S.r.l.

Main authors: Guillermo Oviedo Hernandez (BayWa r.e.), Paolo V. Chiantore (BayWa r.e.)

Release date: October 2023

Status: Final

Dissemination level: Public

This document has been produced in the context of the Trust-PV Project.
The project has received funding from the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union under contract number 952957.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
TERMS AND DEFINITIONS 4
01 INTRODUCTION 5
THE TRUST-PV APPROACH TO REVAMPING AND REPOWERING 5

02 THE CONCEPT 7
THE ROLE OF THE DSS 7

03 PROGRESS ON IMPLEMENTATION 9
PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OVERVIEW 9

DATA ANALYSIS PROCESS 10

OUTLOOK 12

04 BENEFITS 12
REFERENCES 13

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TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

Decision Support Software cloud platform that performs big data analysis of ingested data,
System (DSS) calculates KPIs and gives automatic suggestions on specific targets, such as the
best time to revamp a plant.

Decommissioning Process of removing a PV system or component from an active status. For a

complete PV system, it means that it is deconstructed and the land is made
ready for redevelopment or returned to its original use

End-of-life (EoL) Natural or planned end of a PV system or component service lifetime

Performance Loss Rate Parameter indicating the decline of a PV module power output over time (in %
(PLR) per year)

Preparing for re-use Checking, cleaning and/or repairing operations by which PV components are
prepared so that they can be re-used

Recycling Any recovery operation by which PV waste materials are reprocessed into
products, materials or substances whether for the original or other purposes

Repowering Increasing the nominal power of the PV system by replacement of old

components (mainly modules and inverters) by new ones, to enhance its overall
performance.

Revamping Replacement of old components of a PV system (mainly modules and inverters)

by new ones, to enhance its overall performance without substantially changing
its nominal power and without compromising new land

Re-use Any operation by which PV products or components that are not waste are used
again for the same purpose for which they were conceived.

Re-used PV module A PV module that has been removed from a first PV system and prepared for
re-use in another PV system.

Waste Any substance or object which the holder discards or intends or is required to
discard.

E-waste Electrical or electronic equipment which is waste, more formally ‘waste electrical
and electronic equipment (WEEE)’

Functional PV module A PV module that performs its primary function without posing a risk for the
operators, the environment and to the system they form part of and its
performance follows a natural degradation trend according to the manufacturer
specifications

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01 INTRODUCTION
By the time this report is being written (Q4 2023), the very first European PV fleets installed during the boom
of feed-in tariff schemes had passed midlife (10+ years old) and we are observing an unprecedented increase
of revamping and repowering activities aimed at improving the performance of existing assets through the
replacement of old PV modules and inverters by new ones. On one hand, revamping and repowering projects
open up new opportunities for optimizing the performance of existing PV assets without compromising new
land. On the other hand, this premature replacement of PV components contributes to a challenging increase
of CAPEX for asset owners that usually must tackle in a short period of time.
In short, the European solar sector is facing two big challenges:
▪ Aging PV-assets (exceeding 10+ years under operation)
▪ Unavailability of spare parts and technical support from manufacturers
But, on the other hand, we are seeing lots of technological improvements and steady decreasing prices of
components.

Figure 1. Difference between revamping and repowering. Source: BayWa r.e.

THE TRUST-PV APPROACH TO REVAMPING AND REPOWERING

TRUST-PV is conceived with the involvement of the whole value chain to develop innovation in products and
services with the final aim of improving PV plants performance and reliability beyond the point of connection.
The project pursues its main objectives by innovating industrial and commercial products, processes, and
services. The results will be proven from fab to field and will finally create impact through large-scale
commercialization of the exploitable innovations and through open innovation departing from public results
and already identified at proposal level.
TRUST-PV concentrates on innovating at three different layers: PV plant components, PV system, PV point of
connection with the grid and PV plant portfolio. Thirteen Results serve towards the achievement of the
objectives (see Figure 2).

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 Figure 2. TRUST-PV mapping of Results. Source: trust-pv.eu

Out of these 13 Results, this report focuses on R5, namely “Progressive Repowering”, which belongs to the
System layer and is particularly interconnected with the Decision Support System of R10 and with the Wireless
Sensor Networks of R7.
The key ambition of the Progressive Repowering task is to contribute to the increasing lifetime and
performance of PV plants, reducing its environmental impact. Supported by advanced monitoring (e.g. low-
cost module level enabled by IoT), this Result explores the development of an automated categorization and
clustering of modules and inverters based on actual power classes and efficiency, and then it will suggest the
right moments to perform component substitutions and optimal string reconfiguration to minimize mismatch
losses (due to uneven degradation of modules and the incorporation of new modules). Through the
“progressive” revamping and repowering approach, it will be possible to increase the plants’ energy
yield without increasing the land needed, using, during the years, the most up-to-date components,
with the highest efficiency. To optimize the decision-making process, the solution will incorporate costs
analysis and economic predictions (e.g. ROI breakpoints for each revamping suggestion).
As case studies, the project partners selected a number of PV plants in different climates, with different module
types, different construction systems (rooftops, ground-mounted, tracked) that will be used as realistic
scenarios for revamping and repowering projects.

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02 THE CONCEPT
The concept of “progressive repowering” will allow to intervene several times during the lifetime of a plant,
splitting the repowering investment in more than one shot. And it is aimed at increasing energy production
without requiring additional land. This concept also follows a path of circular economy, that promotes re-use
and recovery of materials for further use in the industry [1-3].
The concept is built upon two solid foundations: advanced monitoring and field interventions.
a) Advanced monitoring is about the automated categorization and clustering of modules and inverters
based on actual power classes;
b) Field interventions will then be carried out for partial and tailored plant reconfiguration.
At the core of the TRUST-PV project, there’s the Decision Support System that will suggest the right moments
(based on technical-economic feasibility calculations) to progressively perform component substitutions and/or
relocations for optimal string reconfiguration to minimise mismatch losses, which are due to the uneven natural
aging of the PV modules.

Figure 3. The progressive revamping/repowering concept. Source: BayWa r.e.

THE ROLE OF THE DSS

The project aims to leap beyond the current state of the art by exploiting the Decision Support System (DSS)
(Result 10) that will constantly digest data on:
▪ The assets’ data (relevant for repowering), including all the technical considerations (mechanical,
electrical, communication and regulatory);
▪ Up-to-date market and financial figures (new module and inverter prices, second hand market status
to sell functional modules to be re-used, electricity market prices, etc.);
▪ Stakeholders’ expectations;

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 ▪ Module and inverter efficiency, together with all technical and commercial data, such as current and
historical performance, calculation of future yields, revenues and costs, expected life span under
current and modified conditions, and adaption to updated maintenance requirements.
The platform will then automatically analyse the Progressive Repowering scenarios and will provide the best
solutions available by taking into consideration the following (see Figure 4):
(i) Economic analysis and business cases: All technical and commercial data, such as historical
performance, future performance, revenues, costs, extended life span and changed maintenance
requirements need to be considered to come up with a prognosis of the future income streams.
(ii) Sensitivity analysis: This will provide a better understanding of the influence of changing conditions,
e.g. if the costs for the project and/or the electricity price will change or the projected performance will
be different than the assumptions.
(iii) Repowering suggestions with well-defined structures, including:
Performance analysis: historical yield assessment and identification of performance issues, PLR
calculation, verification of issues on site with additional specialized inspections, root cause analysis.
Potential assessment: technical feasibility study of different options, commercial analysis, taking
investment costs and additional revenues or reduced losses into account, analysis of the regulatory
requirements and their implications, risk assessment.
Solution Design: technical information to support the execution of detailed engineering, determination
of all costs for time and material, setting up project plan, update commercial analysis with more precise
information.
Implementation plan: execution of repowering measures, project management, constant quality
control, commissioning and documentation, update of maintenance guidelines.

Figure 4. Flow diagram of the Progressive Revamping concept. BayWa r.e.

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03 PROGRESS ON IMPLEMENTATION
As a first step towards the implementation of the Progressive Revamping concept explained so far, a complex
utility scale PV plant was chosen as case study (see Figure 5). Then, a powerful and efficient performance
analysis process was developed (see Figure 6) to collect, clean and perform the relevant calculations needed
to interact with the DSS. As visualization tool, interactive dashboards were developed using PowerBI that
provide a user-friendly experience. Finally, the implementation process consisting of four steps is summarized
and depicted in Figure 7.

Figure 5. PV plant used as case study. Source: BayWa r.e.

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OVERVIEW

Data streams from PV plants are huge due to the numerous sensors installed on-site which measure (usually
every 5, 10 or 15 minutes), ambient and electrical variables which thought the SCADA system are remotely
centralized and analysed in a O&M Control Room. This raw monitoring data, as it is, is often good enough for
basic maintenance activities but not reliable enough to perform advances analysis that could be then linked to
revamping suggestions.
Therefore, with the application of Big Data concepts and python programming, it was possible to build a robust
performance tool better suited for our purposes, which could be seen as an extension to the state-of-the-art
monitoring system. This tool, includes but is not limited to the following dashboards:

• Plant Performance and KPIs at different levels (meters, substation, inverter, MPPT, etc.);
• Data Quality of each sensor installed and used for metrics calculations;
• Inverters efficiency by location using cleaned data;
• Trackers Analysis and Performance of each MPPT;
• Analysis of the Soiling Ratio and best time to clean suggestion.

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DATA ANALYSIS PROCESS
This process is supported by many algorithms that were developed in a standard way in order to be replicable
for other PV Plants. The most important requirement is the API access to the monitoring system for visualizing
the plants and all the available sensors.
The data analysis process (depicted in Figure 6) uses three main Python algorithms, named A1, A2 and A3
respectively:
▪ A1 collects monitoring data and cleans it (Data Quality Check) before storing it into a dedicated database;
▪ A2 collects complementary data from external sources (satellite irradiance, weather data, etc.);
▪ A3 structures, resamples if necessary and runs all the calculations needed for the dedicated metrics;
▪ P1 includes all the visualizations and reporting.
The Data Quality Check is a cleaning process that identifies common data issues such as missing data,
outliers, dead values, night-time values and day-time zeros (in compliance with IEC 61724-1-2016 Photovoltaic
system performance - Part 1 Monitoring).

Figure 6. Data flow for performance analysis. Source: BayWa r.e.

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 Figure 7. Four-phase approach to implementation. Source: BayWa r.e.

One of the most useful visualizations for decision making, is the layout coloured by Performance Ratio (PR),
that consists of a recreation of the physical layout of the PV plant (see Figure 8 and Figure 9). For our case
study, this type of analysis was implemented at transformer level, where each transformer area was coloured
differently based on the PR value: the darker the colour, the lower the PR.
It will be then possible, based on this type of interactive dashboards, to just click on the section of the plant of
interest (the one with the lowest PR, for example) to trigger the DSS engine that will then perform the Potential
assessment, Solution Design and Implementation plan.

Figure 8. Plant overview dashboard. Source: BayWa r.e.

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 Figure 9. Colormap by Performance Ratio. Source: BayWa r.e.

OUTLOOK
It is envisioned that by the end of the project (August 2024), the implementation process and integration with
Antares (DSS) will be completed and demonstrated in large scale. Results will be made public on the project’s
official website (trust-pv.eu/outputs).

04 BENEFITS
To summarize, the progressive revamping/repowering concept brings in four main benefits:
▪ Maximum plant efficiency: constant increase of energy yield instead of accepting the natural component
degradation.
▪ Optimization of use of land: this will occur without increasing the land needed, by using the most up-to-
date components, with higher efficiency than those that will be substituted.
▪ Flexible financial approach to repowering: this method allows to distribute capital expenditures into
multiple years, instead of large “one-shot” investment as it is common practice today, reaching similar if
not better financial results during the lifetime of the plant.
▪ Circular economy: e-waste reduction connected to second life (re-use of decommissioned PV modules)
and material recovery from disposed components for further use in the industry.

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REFERENCES
[1] G Oviedo Hernandez et al 2022. Trends and innovations in photovoltaic operations and maintenance.
Prog. Energy 4 042002
[2] van der Heide A et al 2023, Re-use of PV modules: progress in standardisation and learnings from a real
case study, Proc. of the 40th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, Lisbon, Portugal,
https://doi.org/10.4229/EUPVSEC20232023-5DO.15.6.
[3] TRUST-PV report on re-use of PV modules and circular business models: https://trust-pv.eu/outputs/
[4] SolarPower Europe (2021)– Operation & Maintenance Best practices guidelines version 5.0
(https://www.solarpowereurope.org/insights/thematic-reports/o-and-m-best-practice-guidelines-version-5-0)

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www.trust-pv.eu

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