Applications of Artificial Intelligence to Photovoltaic Systems: A Review

This article analyzes the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and photovoltaic (PV) systems. Solar energy is one of the most important renewable energies, and the investment of businesses and governments is increasing every year. AI is used to solve the most important problems found in PV systems, such as the tracking of the Max Power Point of the PV modules, the forecasting of the energy produced by the PV system, the estimation of the parameters of the equivalent model of PV modules or the detection of faults found in PV modules or cells. AI techniques perform better than classical approaches, even though they have some limitations such as the amount of data and the high computation times needed for performing the training. Research is still being conducted in order to solve these problems and find techniques with better performance. This article analyzes the most relevant scientific works that use artificial intelligence to deal with the key PV problems by searching terms related with artificial intelligence and photovoltaic systems in the most important academic research databases. The number of publications shows that this field is of great interest to researchers. The findings also show that these kinds of algorithms really have helped to solve these issues or to improve the previous solutions in terms of efficiency or accuracy.