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Differentiating Quality: PV Standards & Methods for Underwriting Certainty

March 6, 2012
San Francisco, California

With sponsorship from DOE's Solar Energy Technologies Program through the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, CleanPath hosted a workshop to build communication between investors and technical standards and testing organizations.

The primary objectives of the workshop were to:

  • Discuss the standards and methods needed to ensure the quality of PV performance prediction
  • Identify the standards and methods needed to ensure selection of quality components
  • Identify the standards and methods needed to ensure the quality of operations and feedback
  • Identify the needs of underwriters for lower capital costs
  • Identify the specific roles of national laboratories regarding standards and methods

Below are the presentations given at the workshop. The following documents are available as Adobe Acrobat PDFs.

Quality Assurance Challenge Address

Capital and Underwriter Requirements/Needs

Moderator: Andrew Braff, WSGR
GOAL: Identify specific needs of underwriters for lower capital costs

  • Giuanluca Signorelli, Rabobank
  • Jason Kaminsky, Wells Fargo
  • GCube Overview, John McLane, G-Cube (Lloyd's of London)
  • Greg Rosen, Union Bank

Independent Engineers inputs/outputs

GOAL: Identify gaps from available research and standards

Perspectives

National Organization Role

GOAL: Identify specific role for national labs for standards/methods

Roundtables Program

Quality of Performance Prediction

Identify next steps of needs to support PV system modeling software, .pan file validation of modules, modeling of new technology, and long degradation of system performance.

Chairs: Rhonda Bailey, DNV, Jeff Newmiller, DNV

Quality of Goods Installed

Identify the necessary standards/methodology to approach testing PV systems to ensure selection of quality components, consistent definition of "performance," and reliability predictors.

Quality of Operations and Feedback

Identify the necessary standards/methodology to gather information about the actual "performance," uncertainty, and mechanism to feedback along the quality assurance chain.