The Impact of PV Panel Positioning and Degradation on the PV Inverter Lifetime and Reliability

The photovoltaic (PV) inverter lifetime is affected by mission profiles, which include the solar irradiance and ambient temperature of the installation site. In previous research, the design for reliability approach has been used to evaluate the reliability of the PV inverter, where the solar irradiances have been measured on a fixed tilt and orientation angle. In most cases, the tilt is chosen to be the latitude angle and the orientation is facing south for maximum energy production throughout the year. However, the impact of the tilt and orientation of the PV array on the inverter lifetime has not been considered so far. The tradeoff between the PV energy yield and the inverter lifetime can be analyzed for different PV array positioning. This article thus evaluates the lifetime of the PV inverter with varying the tilt and orientation angle of PV panels, where the PV panel degradation rate is also taken into account. The evaluation is based on the mission profiles of Algiers, Algeria. The results reveal that orientation has a strong impact on the PV inverter loading and certain orientations result in high PV energy production and long lifetime of the PV inverter. It is also shown that the PV panel aging in Algeria has a significant impact on the lifetime estimation of the PV inverter for different orientations.