IIT Bombay studies reconfiguring degraded PV plants for savings

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai studied how to improve performance in degraded solar power plants. They tested different ways of rearranging PV modules and used a Python-based model that simulates each solar cell. The team compared how much energy each method could recover and how much it would cost to replace the modules. The study looked at both India and the USA to understand how labor costs affect the results. According to the researchers, reconfiguration works best when degradation is uneven, labor is cheap, and only a few I-V tests are done. They found it can be a good option when the payback period is less than two years.