The European PV system monitoring guidelines - Modernisation under the PERFORMANCE project

The rapid growth in the PV market coupled with increasing diversity in system applications and users represents a growing challenge in terms of maintaining system quality and ensuring high performance levels over the system lifetime. In that context, the EC-funded Integrated Project PERFORMANCE is developing a modernised set of guidelines for the monitoring of PV system performance. The completed guidelines will be easily accessible for all interested parties, from system designers to system users and financiers, and will provide guidance on both the measurement of PV systems and the analysis of their performance. In this paper, the development approach is discussed, including the method for determining the complexity of monitoring required for different systems.