Energetica India - June 2020

SOLAR POWER 29 energetica INDIA- June_2020 *Ginc – Global inclined insolation Robotic cleaning is gaining traction for large projects as avail- ability of water and discharge of RO waste water to ground table is becoming and environmental concern. Options from potable to fixed robots are available in plenty in the market in all various configurations for all types of installation. This seg - ment has made an impactful progress. Adding robots to the plant require design to be optimised with respect to the land to ensure lesser robots per MWp. Robots operations are now managed by Artificial intelligence driven algorithms factoring local dust deposition & weather conditions to improve cleaning cycles and optimise robots total cost of ownership during the asset’s life time. Newer technologies like coating of solar panels with photo-cat- alytic& anti-reflective coating on top modules to ensure higher sunlight absorption is also paving way into the market. Each of the factor above adds compounded advantage when it comes to tapping higher energy. Further with string inverters the generation tends to going further north in each case be- cause of reduced DC mismatch losses, higher MPPT leading to maximum harvesting at inverter levels and potentially higher plant availability which has led to mass adoption of string in- verters for utility scale plants. The gain in generation with increasing technology improve- ment do comes at a cost add on to the balance of system expected plant cost for a 300MW+ project has been bench- marked as below: