Energetica India Magazine: september 2020

SOLAR POWER Significance of Good O&M of Solar PV Power Plants The challenging part of O&M is not the Operations and Maintenance but is the ability to reflect the specialties of each system, topologies, installation sites, and country requirements. Good Operations and Maintenance (O&M) ensures high levels of techni- cal, operational, safety, and economic performance of a photovoltaic system throughout its lifetime. These services are essential and mitigate potential risk, enhance generation and bring down the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), thus, positively impacts the return on in- vestment (ROI). These points are widely acknowledged by all the stakeholders in the solar industry. Broadly speaking, the lifecycle of a PV project can be divided into 4 phases: 1. Development: few months to even few years 2. Construction: a few months 3. O&M: typically 25+ years 4. Decommissioning, disposal and recy- cle: a few months Clearly, the O&M phase is the longest one, therefore, increasing the quality of O&M services is crucial. The challenging part of O&M is not the Operations and Maintenance but is the ability to reflect the specialties of each system, topolo- gies, installation sites, and country re- quirements. There is a lot of confusion or lack of clarity and knowledge in the industry regarding the minimum require- ments (scope) which sometimes creates pain points down the line. Some of the standards used during O&M activities are listed in the figure below: 57 energetica INDIA- September_2020 Pranav Maheshwari Co-Founder and Head of Technology, PV Diagnostics Sudarshan Bhosle Lead Analyst - Backend Analysis team, PV Diagnostics Solar PV Power Plant’s Operation and Maintenance Solar PV Power Plant’s operation used to be tractable in the past, but with in- creasing grid integration efforts, there is a requirement of more active & flexible operations by grid operators. Some ac- tivities like scheduled shutdowns, power curtailment, frequent adjustment of set- tings such as power factor, voltage and frequency tolerances demand custom- ized operations to maintain the efficiency as well as safety of the plant. Thus, the operation process may look different for each plant but major opera- tions involved in all the plants are: • Maintenance of documentation and checklist of activities. • Plant performance monitoring and su- pervision • Performance analysis and improve- ment • Reporting and Technical Asset Man- agement • Power plant security • Optimization of O&M The key to optimum operations is the ef- ficiency of the management part in the plant throughout its lifetime. In a power plant, there are typically 3 types of main- tenance: 1. Preventive maintenance : This is the core maintenance service which com- prises regular visual and physical in-