According to the Middle East Solar Industry Association (MESIA), solar installations in the MENA region saw a 23% increase in 2023. Growth will accelerate, with MESIA predicting that the current 32 GW will reach 40 GW by 2024, and 180 GW by 2030. In December 2023, Saudi Arabia increased its 2030 solar target to 130 GW, requiring more than 20 GW of annual installations will be required. , moving forward.
The region’s solar industry has so far focused on large-scale PV, with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and, more recently, Saudi Arabia now home to some of the world’s largest solar installations . While the region is no stranger to mega-project construction, the local solar industry is young and has limited infrastructure to support the development and successful operation of these massive solar projects. When it comes to ensuring long-term quality and performance in a harsh desert environment, the MENA region has so far seen limited development of the expertise to offer laboratory product testing or on-site services such as drone thermography or electroluminescence (EL ) imaging.
“If we look at the services provided, whether commissioning, post-installation inspection or other on-site testing, these all require a much stronger local infrastructure,” said Mohamed Saady, head of technical services and product management for MENA at the Chinese panel maker JinkoSolar. That limitation, he added, could lead to much longer response times and higher costs associated with sourcing the required expertise from further away.
Quality assurance
The production of PV systems has also seen only limited development in the MENA region to date, and may be a prerequisite for the further development of testing and other supporting industries. “Most reliability testing is carried out by the suppliers and in laboratories close to production,” explains Jörg Althaus, director of quality assurance and technical services at consultancy Clean Energy Associates (CEA). “Local testing makes sense because you need to build that expertise, but it’s unlikely that will happen until we really see production scale up in the region.”
At the same time, manufacturers already active in the MENA region confirm that local infrastructure for testing products and systems could save them a lot of time and money and encourage more production capacity in the region.
“We perform full quality testing in-house, but sometimes you need to collaborate with third parties for extensive testing or calibration,” said Mohammed Shehadeh, chief technology officer at Jordanian module manufacturer Philadelphia Solar. “And it costs us a lot to send modules to Europe, China or the US.”
The current lack of local testing infrastructure can also slow manufacturers’ progress in adopting new technology, Shehadeh noted, because modules must be shipped to distant testing facilities for certification every time a change or upgrade is made. “There is the cost of all these shipments and also much longer lead times that can delay our ability to get to market early with a strong new product. A regional facility could certainly speed up that process.”
Gulf Renewables Laboratory (GRL), located in Dammam on the Gulf Coast of Saudi Arabia, is a joint venture between US-based testing organization UL [Underwriters’ Laboratories] and Saudi Arabia-based GCC Lab, and is one of the first in the region to be certified by the IECEE – a body of the International Electroctechnical Commission – to test PV modules and systems against various industry standards.
“Over time, we expect more factories to come to Saudi Arabia, attracted by the huge number of projects and the local content program adopted by the Ministry of Energy,” said Saeed Balhaddad, managing director at GRL. “We expect more demand for in-house testing and certification.” He added that some developers are conducting sample testing on imported modules upon arrival in Saudi Arabia, which is recommended by regulators and other industry experts.
While GRL offers laboratory testing services, Kamalakannan Jayachandran, a renewable energy engineer at GRL, confirmed that the laboratory’s operations since its inception in 2017 have been focused on on-site testing. “Currently, more than 4 GW of PV projects have been installed in Saudi Arabia and we are receiving repeated requests for power performance testing, performance ratio testing, EL testing and drone thermography,” he said.
Demand is expected to increase, with property developers and owners adding more testing to ensure the long-term reliability of their assets.
“Some tests, such as post-delivery inspection and scheduled capacity tests, are new to the market and have not yet been taken up, but these are now being made mandatory by developers and could be implemented at all locations soon,” Jayachandran said.
Desert code
In addition to locating facilities, testing specific to the harsh desert environment is something that project developers increasingly require, both in laboratory testing used to certify modules and on-site testing to identify weaknesses in the field. “Projects in Saudi Arabia or the MENA region usually require more extensive testing that goes beyond the usual standards, whether that is double or triple, or even different types of testing,” said JinkoSolar’s Saady.
A study by MESIA compared the environmental stresses placed on a module installed in Dubai with that in Berlin (see graph at left) and noted that the heat and high irradiation in Dubai increased the risk of module performance issues, including discoloration of the encapsulant, oxidation of compounds, chalking of the backplate, delamination, finger breakage, wafer cracking and removal of the anti-reflective coating from the module. The industry association also recommends testing beyond the IEC 61215 standard used for most modules to better simulate the harsh environments that modules installed in the MENA region are likely to experience.
GRL has developed a so-called ‘desert code’ for module testing, a modified version of IEC 61215, based on similar test processes, but implemented with more stringent parameters. For example, in thermal cycling, where modules are repeatedly exposed to extreme temperature fluctuations, IEC 61215 specifies 200 cycles from -40 C to a maximum temperature of 85 C. GRL will perform 400 cycles and increase the maximum temperature to 105 C. The 1,000 hours of exposure moist heat, specified in the IEC standard, is also doubled to 2,000 hours. “Within the IEC standard itself, there are clauses that state that to meet a specific requirement for installation conditions, you can take testing to the next level,” Jayachandran said. “In the future, this will be a real game changer for the certification of PV modules.”
In addition to increasing the parameters of current tests in this way, many experts fully recognize the need for new tests. “For every project in Saudi Arabia, we are now conducting extensive testing for different BOM combinations as the IEC standard is not sufficient and will not meet the requirements of the PPA [power purchase agreement]” said Jinko’s Saady, taking particular note of other standards such as IEC 62892:2019 and IEC TS 63126:2020 that specify guidelines for qualifying PV modules, components and materials for use at high temperatures.
In the desert, sand abrasion is another potential problem that may not be adequately taken into account in current testing. CEA’s Althaus said that while most projects now use glass-to-glass modules that are generally less vulnerable to sand, there can still be a risk of loss of transparency in the glass or erosion of cables and junction boxes, and that there possibly an entirely new standard might be needed. “None of the sand wear tests have a definition for products that will be installed outdoors in the desert for 20 years,” he explained. “That is a problem that the solar industry faces; modules are a long-lived product and most standards initially adopted from other industries are not intended for that type of operation.”
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