Reliability in Solar Power Generation
Murphy's law says that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. One of the corollaries for electrical hardware says that "a fast switching transistor will blow to protect a 20 cent fuse."
The field experience for solar power plants confirms this law. 😉 The most common component to fail is the inverter, an expensive collection of very fast transistors. The 6th most common failure is the fuse.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory study of more than 100,000 solar systems [1][2][3][4] documents the failure distribution.
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Now, the reality is that the root causes for the inverter failures are usually driven by heat and electrical stresses not fuse failures. These are almost always uncorrelated events. The top three inverter failure causes are capacitors, PCB, and semiconductor switches [5][6]. But, its fun to see something that looks like Murphy's law in the data. 😀
References
[1] https://commercialsolarguy.com/wp-content/uploads/10.1002@pip.3262.pdf
[2] https://sunspec.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/PVSystemComponentFaultandFailureCompilationandAnalysis.pdf
[3] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1659924
[4] https://solar-media.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/Pubs/PVTP24/PV%20reliability%20lessons%20from%20100%2C000%20systems.pdf
[5] https://www.nrel.gov/pv/assets/pdfs/2014_pvmrw_35_flicker.pdf
[6] https://www.nrel.gov/pv/assets/pdfs/2014_pvmrw_37_vidano.pdf
