Enhancing Warehouse Sustainability through Solar Panel Performance Analysis

Sammanfattning

In today’s world, the growing use of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems especially in the logistics sector has provided companies with new opportunities to produce renewable energy, improve their sustainability performance, and reduce carbon emissions from their operations. Importantly, the deployment of solar systems also helps contribute to broader environmental goals such as the European Green Deal and net-zero emission goals in the long run, since these corporations can decrease their environmental footprints. However, in reality the actual performance of PV systems often differs from their theoretical energy output because of some technical, operational, environmental, and system-level factors that will be explored in this entire study. The performance analysis of some selected PV installations across the logistic facilities located in Belgium, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Thailand is presented in this study. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the gaps between expected and actual performance of PV systems, identifying the key root causes behind performance deviations, translate those performance gaps into business opportunities, and recommend measures that support to improve performance. The research uses a multi-case study design using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Initially, With the given production data, performance evaluation is done using standard performance metrics such as Performance Ratio (PR). Then, further analysis is supported by data gathered through questionnaire responses, interviews with site stakeholders, and benchmarking from literature sources. Our root cause analysis groups the causes into four key dimensions like technical, operational, environmental, and contractual /system constraints. The findings of this study show significant performance gaps between several sites. Even though root causes behind these gaps may vary in local conditions as well as operational practices. While many previous studies have mainly focused more on the impact of environmental and technical dimensions, this study shows that along with technical and environmental losses, operational and contractual / system issues are the most important dimensions behind solar PV systems underperformance. Based on the results, this study suggests further portfolio-level recommendations including improving monitoring systems, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based performance monitoring, predictive maintenance, inclusion of proactive cleaning, and improved integration of photovoltaic systems, Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), and grid constraint can significantly enhance the performance. Overall, the research contributes by giving a broader and more integrated perspective on PV systems, especially within logistics operations. Also, the proposed framework will support structure and scalable decision making for future PV portfolio management. Importantly, study highlights the importance of combining technical, operational and business aspects in order to maximize sustainability benefits.