Introduction to special issue on PV systems performance and reliability

The papers in this special issue have been selected from the systems and ba lance-of-systems sessions at the 1998 Photovoltaic Performance and Reliabil ity Workshop. The Workshop was held November 3-5, 1998 and hosted by the Fl orida Solar Energy Center, Cocoa Beach, Florida under sponsorship, of the U S National Center for Photovoltaics (National Renewable Energy Laboratory a nd Sandia National Laboratories). The topics and issues addressed by these papers were identified in an invited review paper on PV systems by the gues t 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 t hese topics at the workshop. The papers that follow, are the results of tha t effort. We have organized the papers by topic: (1) codes and standards; ( 2) reliability; (3) design issues; and (4) commercialization. Published in 1999 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd This article is a US Government work and is in the public domain in the United States.