Performance Monitoring and Test System for Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Systems

This paper describes a performance monitoring and test system for grid-connected photovoltaic systems. The purpose of the research is to develop an on-site test platform to collect the data and evaluate the performance of the grid-connected PV system. The performance monitoring and test system consists of a meteorological data collection system for measuring meteorological parameters (e.g. irradiance, ambient air temperature, etc.), a set of data collection boxes for measuring electrical parameters (e.g. DC current, DC voltage, AC current, AC voltage, AC power, etc.) and a PC. The collected data have been transmitted to the PC by two methods, wired transmission and wireless transmission. The software of the data acquisition system based on LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) package is used to process, display and store the collected data in the PC disk. The performance monitoring and test system was installed in a grid-connected building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) system for an on-site measurement in Gejiang province in China. The obtained results demonstrate that it has the ability for data collecting, processing and analyzing and it meets the requirement of the performance evaluation for a grid-connected PV system.