Introduction to Special Issue on PV Systems Performance and Reliability

The papers in this special issue have been selected from the systems and balance-of- systems sessions at the 1998 Photovoltaic Performance and Reliability Workshop. The workshop was held November 3-5, 1998 and hosted by the Florida Solar Energy Center, Cocoa Beach, Florida under sponsorship of the US National Center for Photovoltaics (National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories). The topics and issues addressed by these papers were identified in an invited review paper on PV systems by the guest editors. Their work was published earlier this year in Volume 7, Number 1 of Progress in Photovoltaics ('Photovoltaic Systems: An End-of-Millennium Review'). Experts in the PV community were asked to make presentations on these topics at the workshop. The papers that follow are the results of that effort. The papers are organized by topic: (1) codes and standards; (2) reliability; (3) design issues; and (4) commercialization