Outdoor performance quantification and understanding of various PV technologies using the IEC 61853 matrix

The principle PV module product rating instrument is the DC power at Standard Test Conditions (STC). For a full year energy prediction, additional performance parameters (e.g. NOCT) have been introduced but have left room for improvement. The newly IEC 61853 norm defines a Pmpp-matrix with 7 settings of GPOA and 4 settings of Tmod, which enables an accurate yield calculation for a specific climate. In our contribution, this GPOA-Tmod-matrix is used for understanding and comparing various PV technologies. In total five visualization and statistical tools have been demonstrated. i) The Pmpp-matrix in colorplot can reveal potential performance issues during specific moments of the year. ii) The significance of each bin to the full year yield is visualized with colormaps of the number of datapoints, irradiation and specific yield. iii) Adding statistics per bin enables cleaning the measurement data from outliers that are common in 24/7 outdoor field data (like shading, power cuts, etc..). iv) Increasing the bin sizing of both the GPOA- and the Tmod-axis improves the visibility of small performance trends. v) Plotting other module parameters (like VOC, Vmpp, ISC, Impp, FF, AOI, IAM) in the same matrix representation is of great help to give a physical explanation to the observed performance phenomena. Finally, the PR-matrix is presented with an additional filter showing only bins that contribute more than a threshold value (e.g. 0.5%) to the total yield. All these visualizations and tooling was applied on the BIPV round-robin module of Task15E. The PR-matrix shows a remarkable (too) low PR for the lowest row of irradiance bins with GPOA=100 W/m2. With the aid of the AOI-matrix this has been attributed to shallow angles of sunlight that are most prominent in these bins. More use cases are presented in which various PV-technologies have been compared side by side. A c-Si and a CIGS-module in a BIPV-façade in the Netherlands have about the same full year DC PR. However, the PR-matrix, showed two distinct effects. On another rack mount setup, the comparison of the PR-matrix of an in-house developed IBC (mini-) module and an n-PERT module also showed very distinct effects in the PR-matrix, whereas the full-year-round PR of both technologies are very competitive and hides all the interesting phenomena.