Co-located Accelerated Testing of Module Level Power Electronics and Associated PV Panels

In order to study the relative degradation between co-located PV modules and microinverters in an ACPV configuration, four 260 Watt PV modules and four 250 W microinverters purchased on the open market have been co-located in a thermal chamber set at a static temperature (69 degrees C). Instantaneous electrical/thermal measurements have been taken on the microinverters with periodic dark IV measurements on the modules. After over 10,000 hours of testing, no failures or observable degradation have been seen in either the module or microinverter. Using average measured field-temperature data with Military Handbook analysis, this indicates an approximate field use of 44 years of operation lifetime for PV modules, and 13 years of operation for microinverters with reliability of 66.87% with a lower one-sided confidence level of 80%.