When the pandemic pulled crews away from a big solar plant in northwest Algeria, the panels paid for it. Researchers who tracked the 12 MW site in Sidi Bel Abbes for six years say output efficiency fell sharply in 2020, and they link the slump to reduced cleaning and maintenance.
The yardstick is the performance ratio, which compares the electricity a plant actually delivers with what it should produce given the sunshine it received. In 2019 the plant scored about 85%. In 2020 it dropped to roughly 79%, a loss of more than six points in a single year, even though the authors describe sunshine that year as favorable. By 2023 the score was back near 85%.
The authors say the dip shows how much regular upkeep matters for holding on to energy and keeping a plant running well. That is their reading, in their own framing, and not something we could test ourselves.
How the plant is built and watched
The site uses tens of thousands of polycrystalline silicon modules from Hanwha Qcells, paired with SMA inverters, and is split into six equal blocks. Data is logged every 15 minutes, and a weather station tracks sunlight, temperature, humidity and wind. Dust is handled by rotating brushes on a tractor-towed frame, which is only semi-automatic, so it depends on people showing up.
Across the six years the plant averaged a performance ratio of about 83%, which the researchers say beats several comparable installations elsewhere. Inverters stayed highly efficient throughout.
What we can't say yet
The summary we read doesn't say how much cleaning was actually cut, or how much of the 2020 loss came from dirt as opposed to other faults. We haven't seen the full paper in the Journal of Engineering Research, and we haven't yet heard from the authors or from an independent solar researcher, so treat the cause as the authors' conclusion, not a proven split.
For owners in dusty regions the lesson is plain: a well-built plant can still lose ground when the brushes stop moving. The study's own numbers suggest a practical check, which is to compare each year's performance ratio with the plant's own past scores, because a drop of six points in a year of good sunshine is worth chasing down. The questions the paper leaves open are the ones operators will want answered: how much cleaning was cut in 2020, and how much of the loss was dirt rather than other faults?
That's wattsup, and here's wattsnext.
Sources
Reported by the WattsUpNext desk from the sources linked below. Spot an error? Tell us at corrections@wattsupnext.com.
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