Issues, Challenges, and Primary Factors in the Estimation of Floating Solar PV Performance

Floating solar photovoltaic (FPV) systems are beginning to play an increasing role worldwide in solar generation's overall contribution to decarbonization and clean energy. There are unique aspects of FPV design, installation, operation, and maintenance when compared to ground-mount solar PV systems that introduce uncertainty into estimating and predicting the performance of these systems using current tools and methods. This work, part of a major project underway to de-risk, validate and field a new FPV system design, describes these uncertainties and challenges, identifies and examines important factors in estimating FPV performance, and illustrates with existing solar PV performance prediction tools the sensitivity of key performance metrics to selected factors.