Data-integrity Checks and Balances in Monitoring of a Solar PV System

Abstract

This paper proposes to perform certain integrity checks and balances to omit the wrong data in the monitoring of a solar PV plant. Further, these checks and balances are segregated into three types: basic, specific, and pattern checks. The former is performed on the data collected from all the types of sensors. However, the second check is performed on the data collected from the specific instruments. These checks are specific to the site, instrument, parameter, etc. The third check verifies the shape of profiles between the data of different sections of the PV system. For the data-inclusion/deletion purpose, the parameters of PV plant are segregated into a triangle-hierarchy of highest-least priority. Some of the proposed checks are performed on the raw data collected from a grid-tied 271 kW PV plant and 6.4 kW test PV plant. The results have indeed identified some of the bad data and validated the proposed checks.