Photovoltaic plant cloud shadowing and energy drops in Northern Europe

In this paper the effect of shadowing due to clouds on the energy production of a photovoltaic power plant installed in northern latitudes in Finland is analyzed. Numerical techniques, which can be also implemented on an embedded system because of their low computational and memory requirements, have been used for having an efficient processing of millions of experimental current vs. voltage curves acquired on the photovoltaic plant. The analysis allows to affirm that, at high latitudes, clouds can have a significant instantaneous effect on the power produced by the plant, but the time duration of the power drop is so short that the energy production is only marginally affected. This result is in full agreement with other studies appeared in the recent literature and suggests that, in such contexts, control electronics producers should avoid to implement related maximum power point tracking techniques for facing mismatched conditions, since their effect on energy production appears to be negligible.