Photovoltaic plant efficiency evaluation : a proposal

This paper present and discuss a method that, starting from the information of a public weather station and a reference panel, gives useful information about the efficiency of a photovoltaic plant. The aim of this paper is to give a method to analyse the effects of the dust on the panel surface comparing, for a given solar radiation level, the energy production of a reference panel estimated in clean condition with the energy produced by the panel in actual condition. The novelty of the method is based on the simplification of the monitoring system devoted to the energy evaluation considering in a suitable way the information collected by public weather stations.