LAUSR

Abstract Nowadays, hybrid solar plant with Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and Photovoltaic systems (PV) is the optimal installation for solar energy conversion. However, a cleaning strategy should be performed with an optimized schedule in order to avoid energy loss as well as to minimize the cleaning and the O&M costs. In this paper, for the first time, investigations on the difference between the cleaning strategy for both a CSP power plant and a PV system installed at the same climate conditions in the mid-south of Morocco were carried out. The most convenient cleaning scenario was identified through the analysis of the cleaning costs and the energy losses, by taking into account different parameters of the site specifications. The results show that in the case of CSP system, a single cleaning per week is found to be the most profitable in comparison to cleaning twice per week (gain of 15 $/month) with manual cleaning. However, the cleaning costs could be decreased by 13% using a cleaning robot. In the case of PV system, the monthly cleaning scenario will return better profits than no cleaning, and will be more efficient in comparison to frequently cleaning daily, weekly, and fortnightly in terms of the abrasion impact on the surface of the PV modules.