Impact Assessment of Wear-Out Failures in Residential PV Systems

This paper presents a novel analytical method to evaluate the influence of photovoltaic (PV) system reliability on energy yield in grid-integrated PV systems. With the global transition to clean energy, consumers need precise insights into the energy production of PV systems to make informed decisions. While previous studies have analyzed the yield of PV systems, they often overlook the time-varying failure rate nature of components such as inverters, which significantly affects energy yield and reliability. Additionally, analytical methods typically do not consider solar panel degradation, which is often only addressed using Monte Carlo simulations. This study employs Markov Reward Models (MRM) and Phase-type distributions to address this gap, providing a more realistic representation of PV system's reliability, and a better estimation of the expected energy yield. The case study results validate the proposed approach, highlighting the importance of considering time-varying failures and their influence on overall energy production.