Effects and recovery of Potential induced degradation (PID) on solar panels

Potential induced degradation (PID) is a well-known and is currently one of the biggest problems that face solar panels and their development as they lead to significant power losses. It has been shown that panels can have a positive or negative bias based PID effects, this depends on the grounding of the panels in the field. This paper serves to show the difference between the two polarities and how do they affect the panels’ performance. The panels in reverse bias have shown to be more resistant that in forward bias, reverse bias panels on average lost 1.54% compared to a more significant 5.31% for forward bias. The percentage losses for 600 hours of PID is very significant as explained in the IEC1804 standard. However, electrical recovery has been done in this research, the results were promising as after 200 hours of reversing the polarities on the panels, the forward bias panels were able to recover 2.42%, the reverse bias panels however showed less progress at 0.37%.