Design of a cleaning program for a PV plant based on the analysis of short-term and long-term effects

Solar photovoltaic (PV) energy has grown significantly during the last years. However, despite of the increase in installed capacity penetration, this energy source still arises important concerns due to the variability of power production. The short-term effects such as cloud shadowing and supply interruptions, as well as long-term effects such as dust accumulation, seasonal variation and ageing of PV modules can generate variability of power production. Therefore, the analysis of all the variability sources in order to provide a statistically consistent power production data represents an important challenge. This work presents a methodology to analyze data from a PV plant located in Chile by isolating the effect produced by soiling and, with this information a cost based cleaning program is proposed.