A rolling-horizon cleaning recommendation system for dust removal of industrial PV panels

Periodic cleaning of photovoltaic (PV) panels, such as every three months, is a common industry practice. However, this fixed period may not be optimal for maximizing the profit of a PV power generation system, due to numerous time-variant influencing factors, such as weather, temperature, etc. To increase the overall profit of a solar farm, it is highly desirable to have a flexible cleaning schedule that considers time-variant influencing factors. For this requirement, a rolling-horizon cleaning recommendation system is presented in this paper. Within this cleaning recommendation system, a prediction model and profit model are proposed. The prediction model, called the ensemble long-term and nonlinear autoregressive, can provide a time-variant future horizon by analyzing and compressing the time-variant characteristics in historical information. The profit model based on mathematical constraints, can process time-variant future horizon output from prediction model to generate a flexible optimized recommendation for cleaning schedule. The effectiveness of the proposed system is validated in real farms and all data used in this paper is collected from real world. The two case studies in experiments show that the profit improvement can reach up to 6% and 30%, respectively.