50-Year PV Module Reliability and Hail Simulation

This directory contains the analysis code and input data used to evaluate long-term PV module survivability under intrinsic reliability failures and stochastic hail exposure, presented in the paper "Defining the 50 Year Module"

The model combines:

• Weibull intrinsic module reliability
• Location-specific hail occurrence and return periods
• Spatial hail-coverage corrections
• Location-specific hail-size distributions
• Conditional broken-glass damage distributions
• Post-hail performance loss rate (PLR)
• Monte Carlo simulation of physical and performance-adjusted capacity over a 50-year lifetime

Files

• hail_model.py — Functions for hail occurrence, damage sampling, Weibull reliability, post-hail degradation, and Monte Carlo project simulation.
• TBD.ipynb — Main analysis notebook used to load model inputs, run individual and Monte Carlo simulations, compare locations, and generate manuscript figures.
• Hail input files — Location-specific return periods, hail-size distributions, spatial exposure information, and empirical damage/PLR distributions used by the model.

Model outputs

The simulations distinguish between:

• Physical capacity — capacity remaining after intrinsic reliability and catastrophic hail failures.
• Effective capacity — physical capacity adjusted for additional performance degradation of hail-exposed surviving modules.

Simulations are evaluated over a 50-year module lifetime, with Year 30 used as a primary project-level comparison point in the current analysis.

Status

Research code under active development. Model assumptions, input-data sources, and analysis methods are documented in the associated manuscript and notebook.