Performance degradation assessment of the three silicon PV technologies

This study investigates seasonal performance and assesses the annual degradation rates (R-D), of three types of silicon-based PV module technologies, using four statistical methods, namely, linear regression (LR), classical seasonal decomposition (CSD), Holt-Winters exponential smoothing (HW), and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) on a 5-year temperature-corrected DC-performance ratio time series. The lowest performance degradation rates being exhibited are found for the polycrystalline silicon (pc-Si) system with a R-D values confined between 0.23%/year and 0.36%/year. The R-D values provided by the four statistical methods to the monocrystalline silicon (mc-Si) PV modules range from 0.40%/year to 0.77%/year. The values attributed to the annual performance degradation rate of PV modules of amorphous silicon technology typically range from 0.31%/year to 0.57%/year.