PV mission profile simplification method for power devices subjected to arid climates

This paper will present a mission profile reduction technique to reduce the simulation time needed to simulate the yearly behaviour of a PV system. Due to the strong climate dependency of the weather and thereby the PV mission profile, the simplification method is likewise strongly climate dependant. The reduction technique will be applied to different PV mission profiles from different arid places around the world (Arizona, Colorado, Spain, Sacramento), where the speed-up of the method will be tested along with the error introduced by the reduction. The method was found to decrease simulation time by up to 98% at a trade-off of a deviation in the damage estimation down to 1.7%.