Featured in Awarding excellence – 01-2022

Dealing with dust

Sand and dust are a PV plant operator’s worst nightmare. Performance losses due to soiling, or “the dust effect,” are a cause for innovation among O&M providers, particularly in dry and dusty regions that are otherwise ideal locations for large-scale solar installations. Yazeed Al-Mousa examines the latest robotic cleaning solutions, as well as the software and sensors that help plant operators with the tricky economic decision of when to actually start cleaning.

By

pv magazine

12 Jan 2022

The Fraunhofer Center for Silicon Photovoltaics predicts that soiling could cause €4 billion to €7 billion of global losses by 2023. | Image: Darbco

For PV power plants, soiling is a highly location-dependent issue, with loss rates due to dust and dirt on solar panels varying from 5% in temperate climates with moderate rainfall, up to as high as 50% in particularly dry and dusty parts of the world. The most common way to deal with soiling is still …

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