The Impact of Different Solar Tracker Systems on Reliability of Photovoltaic Farms

Among different renewable resources technologies associated with solar energies, photovoltaic (PV) systems have grown significantly. The produced power of a PV system is proportional to the solar radiation and so due to the variation in the solar radiation during the day and a year, the generated power of the PV farms changes too. Due to the rotational motion of the earth around itself during a day and also the transitional motion of the earth around the sun during the year, the amount and angle of sunlight on PV panels’ surface change. For enhanced amount of solar radiation on PV panels, the solar tracker can be used to place the solar panels perpendicular to the sun’s rays. Two kinds of solar tracker systems including single-axis and double-axis trackers can be used in PV farms. In this paper impact of solar trackers on PV farms’ reliability is evaluated. For this purpose, a multi-state reliability model is constructed for PV farms where failure of composed elements and change in solar radiation intensity are considered. For determining the optimal states number and associated probabilities of this model, the XB index and fuzzy c-means clustering method are implemented. The suggested reliability model is applied for the adequacy assessment of power networks containing large-capacity PV farms. Besides, the impact of solar trackers on reliability indices of power networks integrated with PV farms is investigated.