Toward Intelligent Fault Diagnosis in Renewable Energy Systems: Integrating Data-Driven and Model-Based Approaches Under Variable Environmental Conditions

Abstract

Renewable energy systems, including solar photovoltaic arrays and wind turbines, operate under highly variable environmental and operating conditions. Factors such as changing irradiance, temperature fluctuations, wind variability, and component aging make Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) particularly challenging. Therefore, developing reliable, accurate, and interpretable diagnostic methods is essential to ensure system efficiency, safety, and long-term operation. Traditional model-based approaches, which rely on physical system models, offer clear interpretability and solid theoretical foundations. However, their effectiveness can be limited by modeling inaccuracies and difficulties in capturing complex nonlinear behaviors. On the other hand, data-driven and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have demonstrated strong capabilities in pattern recognition and fault classification, but often face challenges related to data dependence, limited transparency, and reduced robustness under unseen conditions. This paper provides a comprehensive and structured review of FDD techniques for renewable energy systems, covering model-based, signal-based, data-driven, and hybrid approaches. A unified perspective is presented to clarify the strengths, limitations, and application domains of each category. Particular attention is given to recent advances in hybrid methods that combine physical modeling and AI, including feature fusion, ensemble learning, attention-based models, and transfer learning. Moreover, advanced signal processing techniques are discussed for their role in extracting meaningful features from noisy and non-stationary data. Rather than ranking methods by headline accuracy, which has become saturated and is only weakly comparable across heterogeneous datasets, the review adopts a critical, deployment-oriented perspective that emphasizes cross-condition robustness, standardized benchmarking, and the constraints of real-world deployment. The review also highlights the growing importance of digital twin technology as a promising framework for next-generation FDD systems, enabling real-time monitoring, adaptive learning, and predictive maintenance. Furthermore, Explainable AI is explored as a key direction for improving the transparency and trustworthiness of AI-based diagnostic models. Finally, the paper identifies major challenges and open research issues, such as data scarcity, generalization among different operating conditions, computational efficiency, and system reliability. Future research directions are outlined toward developing more robust, adaptive, and interpretable FDD solutions that can operate effectively in dynamic and uncertain environments.