EN IEC 62446-2 Photovoltaic (PV) Systems - Testing, Documentation and Maintenance Requirements - Part 2: Grid-Connected Systems - Maintenance of PV Systems

The “EN IEC 62446-2 Photovoltaic (PV) systems - Test, documentation and maintenance requirements - Part 2: Grid-connected systems - Maintenance of PV systems” standard, which is based on a European standard and subsequently published by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), describes the basic preventive, corrective and performance-related maintenance requirements and recommendations for grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems.

Maintenance procedures include:

• Basic maintenance of system components and connections for reliability, safety and fire prevention
• Corrective maintenance and troubleshooting measures
• Worker safety

This standard also addresses maintenance activities to maximize expected performance, such as module cleaning and vegetation maintenance. This standard outlines special considerations specific to roof or ground-mounted systems. This standard does not cover off-grid systems or systems incorporating batteries or other energy storage technologies, however, components may be applicable to the photovoltaic circuits of these systems.

This standard also does not cover maintenance of medium- and high-voltage AC equipment, which is sometimes an integral part of larger-scale systems, because these requirements are not specific to photovoltaic systems. Maintenance of photovoltaic systems is generally considered in the same way as the general term operations and maintenance. This standard does not address business or management operational processes (such as forecasting, utility pricing incentives) or other issues driven by factors other than basic system operating conditions, safety, and performance.

Confirmation that a system complies with appropriate design and installation standards is addressed in the EN IEC 62446-1 standard and occurs during initial project commissioning.

The objectives of the EN IEC 62446-2 standard are:

• Identify a set of baseline maintenance requirements that may vary by system type (residential, commercial, utility scale), owner, or financing requirements.
• Identify additional recommended or optional maintenance steps.
• Identify the factors that will be used to determine appropriate maintenance intervals.
• Ensuring that remote diagnostic methods are permitted to be used as a tool for periodic verification, problem identification and early fault detection.
• Ensure that alternative means of achieving maintenance-related requirements are allowed for innovation, manufacturer-specific methods, evolving customer requirements, and the like.

For the purposes of this standard, in addition to the terms and definitions given in the IEC TS 61836 standard and the terms and definitions given in the IEC 62446-1 standard, the following definitions apply:

• A support structure is equipment (rack) used to physically support modules or groups of modules and position them in a fixed or movable position relative to the path of the sun.
• An equipment base is the foundation, usually made of concrete or cement, used to mount and secure inverters, splitters, transformers, or other equipment associated with a photovoltaic system. Equipment bases are typically installed on floor-mounted systems or on the side of buildings for large rooftop systems where the equipment is too large to be wall-mounted.
• A combiner box is a junction box in which parallel connections for photovoltaic arrays, sub-arrays or strings are made.
• A photovoltaic array combiner box is a junction box to which photovoltaic sub-arrays are connected and may also include overcurrent protection or switch disconnect devices. Small arrays usually do not contain sub-arrays, but consist only of strings, while large arrays usually consist of more than one sub-array.
• The balance of system is all components in a renewable energy system other than the mechanism used to harvest the resource (such as photovoltaic panels or modules).
• Lockout/tagout is a safety procedure used to ensure that equipment is properly de-energized and prevented from being re-energized by a lockout mechanism until service personnel determine it is safe to do so.
• A cable bundle is a cable assembly that collects the output of multiple photovoltaic string conductors along a single main conductor. The cable bundle may or may not include fuse components on the individual string conductors.
• A central inverter is an inverter that has more than one sub-array or string circuit as input.

Our organization has a strong staff that closely follows the developments in science and technology in the world and constantly improves itself. Among the numerous test, measurement, analysis and evaluation studies provided for businesses in various sectors, there are also test services in accordance with the standard “EN IEC 62446-2 Photovoltaic (PV) systems - Testing, documentation and maintenance requirements - Part 2: Grid-connected systems - Maintenance of PV systems”.