View article

Currently, renewable energies, particularly photovoltaics (PVs), are becoming one of the most significant sources for electricity generation worldwide. With reference to the International Energy Agency (Snapshot of Global PV Markets, 2022), the total cumulative installed capacity for PV at the end of 2021 reached at least 942 GW, which means that a huge number of PV plants were installed around the world. To keep these plants working effectively and reliably over time and for safety reasons, they should be carefully protected, monitored and supervised (Mellit et al., 2018).

Periodic maintenance is a crucial task, including visual, manual, and automatic inspection, to avoid power output losses (Hernández-Callejo et al., 2019; and Gonzalo et al., 2020). In this context, various norms and international standards have been developed for PV plant performance evaluation and testing (IEC 62548: 2016; IEC 62446-2: 2020 …