Measuring cleanness of solar photovoltaic systems with Soltell's Sensorless technology

The impact of soiling, including dust and dirt, is accumulating over several weeks to over 20% impact on performance in the Mediterranean region, susceptible to dust from Middle Eastern and North African deserts. A similar effect is also observed in the South-Eastern and Southern US states. Furthermore, in urban and industrial environments an even more dramatic impact is made by fast accumulation of dust and soot. Manual or automatic cleaning is hence required to bring solar photovoltaic (PV) performance to optimal values. The means and the frequency of cleaning is of course a function of several variables, including system size, electricity generation tariff and local soiling factors.

However, the timing of cleaning and its effectiveness for rooftop facilities has so far been a matter of an educated guess. The cleanness measurement capability of Soltell's Sensorless technology is a unique predictive maintenance tool for rooftop PV in terms of cleaning schedule, as well as optimizing other aspects of maintenance. It is powered with an Industrial IoT technology, allowing a sensorless ability to measure soiling on individual solar PV plants, with no need for any sensor installation, calibration and maintenance.

Fig 1. Cleanness factor of solar PV systems with different cleaning schedules in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Cleanness measurement of rooftop solar PV systems - ability to detect the precise soiling impact on PV system performance with no extra hardware, utilizing Sotlell's Industrial IoT capability coupled with artificial intelligence. Above, you can see the comparison of automatically cleaned PV system (daily), periodically cleaned PV systems (once 2-3 weeks) and rarely cleaned PV system (once a season). There is an obvious trend of linear soling accumulation during the dry season with different soiling rates for each location, requiring a quantitative assessment for cleaning schedule optimization.

Interested to learn more on the Sensorless technology to optimize your PV fleet cleaning schedule? Fill-in the demo request form to or contact us get more details.