A Fundamentals Approach to Plant Capacity Testing

This paper provides a recommended method for evaluating the AC capacity of a photovoltaic (PV) generating station. It also presents companion guidance on setting the facilitys capacity guarantee value. This is a principles-based approach that incorporates plant fundamental design parameters such as loss factors, module coefficients, and inverter constraints. This method has been used to prove contract guarantees for over 700 MW of installed projects. The method is transparent, and the results are deterministic. In contrast, current industry practices incorporate statistical regression where the empirical coefficients may only characterize the collected data. Though these methods may work well when extrapolation is not required, there are other situations where the empirical coefficients may not adequately model actual performance.This proposed Fundamentals Approach method provides consistent results even where regression methods start to lose fidelity.