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33rd European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition; 2007-2012, Nominal power measurements of individual PV modules are needed to quantify the critical modules of PV plants offering lower energy production than expected. Today’s state of the art procedure of shipping a small number of modules to a laboratory is time- and cost intensive and it bears the chance of accidental damage. The Portable LED Flasher (PLF) was developed to require no dismounting of the modules. The quality of the PLF was tested on three PV plants in Switzerland. Additionally, ten PV modules of each plant were measured in the certified indoor laboratory of SUPSI, resulting in a maximum deviation of 3% of the STC values. Furthermore, a round robin test on a single crystalline silicon reference module at 25°C was performed at the JRC’s ESTI laboratory, the Swiss Mobile Flasher Bus and SUPSI resulting in a maximum deviation of the mean values below 1% compared to the PLF. A throughput of up to 150 modules or 500 modules respectively per day is expected and the total measurement costs are estimated to be about a tenth of the costs compared to an indoor laboratory. Module temperature measurement is crucial for a low total uncertainty. Thus, methods such as pre-shadowing of the module and approximation of cell temperature are the current focus of further improvement of the PLF measurement method.

31st European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition; 1663-1666, The Solar Energy Industrial Initiative established the objective of integrating PV into the grid to provide up to 12% of the EU electricity demand. The FP7 project PVCROPS has developed solutions to allow the high penetration of PV systems in EU electrical networks and to reduce its Levelized Cost (LCoE) increasing PV system performance. The solutions consist of documents like technical specifications and toolboxes for design, prediction, integration of batteries and automatic detection of performance failures. Six of them are on-line free tools and thirteen are marketable products. These tools allow reducing the LCoE up to 30%, increasing the Performance Ratio up to 9% and PV penetration of 30%. The tools developed by PVCROPS are detailed in www.pvcrops.eu