After a fast photovoltaic (PV) expansion in the past decade supported by many governments in Europe, in this postincentive era, one of the most significant open issues in the PV sector is to find appropriate inspection methods to evaluate real PV plant performance and failures. In this context, PV modules are surely the key components affecting the overall system performance; therefore, there is a main concern about the occurrence of any kind of failure in PV modules. This paper aims to propose a novel concept for monitoring PV plants by using light unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or systems (UASs) during their operation and maintenance. The main objectives of this study are to explore and evaluate the use of different UAV technologies and to propose a reliable, cost-effective, and time-saving method for the inspection of PV plants. In this research, different UAVs were employed to inspect a PV array field. For this purpose, some thermal imaging cameras and a visual camera were chosen as monitoring tools to suitably scan PV modules. The first results show that the procedure of utilizing UAV was effective in the detection of different failures of PV modules. Moreover, such a process was much faster and cost effective than traditional methods.

Unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming a reliable and useful instrument in monitoring and diagnostic services in the energy field. Operation and maintenance is a crucial factor for photovoltaic (PV) plant inspection and control activities, which currently are quite hard to be performed due to manual and dispersive procedures. The automation of the monitoring techniques will become, in future, an essential task in this market, and unmanned aerial system technology can play a role in it. This paper proposes a novel, comprehensive, and innovative approach in order to automate the inspection and prognostic procedure by means of designing a control system in order to provide accurate information on operating conditions of PV plants. The system is able to perform PV systems' monitoring, diagnosis, defects and failures reconnaissance, and data processing and to propose remedial actions. In the current experimental research, only infrared radiation sensor imaging was examined to evaluate thermographic behavior of the PV modules and to build the related image processing algorithm. However, it is possible to easily extend such a procedure in order to manage a larger amount of data. First results of this work have proven that the proposed procedure is very promising being fast, cost effective, and adaptable to large PV plants, which can be controlled during their entire lifetime.

The intermittent and stochastic nature of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) necessitates accurate power production prediction for effective scheduling and grid management. This paper presents a comprehensive review conducted with reference to a pioneering, comprehensive, and data-driven framework proposed for solar Photovoltaic (PV) power generation prediction. The systematic and integrating framework comprises three main phases carried out by seven main comprehensive modules for addressing numerous practical difficulties of the prediction task: phase I handles the aspects related to data acquisition (module 1) and manipulation (module 2) in preparation for the development of the prediction scheme; phase II tackles the aspects associated with the development of the prediction model (module 3) and the assessment of its accuracy (module 4), including the quantification of the uncertainty (module 5); and phase III evolves towards enhancing the prediction accuracy by incorporating aspects of context change detection (module 6) and incremental learning when new data become available (module 7). This framework adeptly addresses all facets of solar PV power production prediction, bridging existing gaps and offering a comprehensive solution to inherent challenges. By seamlessly integrating these elements, our approach stands as a robust and versatile tool for enhancing the precision of solar PV power prediction in real-world applications.

Line-line (LL) and line-ground (LG) faults may not be detected by common protection devices in Photovoltaic (PV) arrays as these faults are not detectable under high fault impedance and low mismatch level. In recent years, many efforts have been devoted to overcome these challenges using intelligent methods. However, these methods could not classify the type of faults and diagnose their severity. In this article, we propose a novel and intelligent fault monitoring method to detect and classify LL and LG faults at the dc side of PV systems. For this purpose, the main features of current-voltage curves under different fault events and normal conditions are extracted. The faults are categorized using the hierarchical classification platform. Later, the LL and LG faults are detected and classified by machine learning methods. The proposed method aims to reduce the amount of dataset, which is required for the learning process, and also obtains a higher accuracy in detecting and classifying the fault events at low mismatch levels and high fault impedance compared with other fault diagnostic methods. The experimental results verify that the proposed method precisely detects and classifies LL and LG faults on PV systems under different conditions and severity with the accuracy of 96.66% and 91.66%, respectively.