A worldwide cost-based design and optimization of tilted bifacial solar farms

By M. T. Patel, M. Ryyan Khan, Xingshu Sun, M. A. Alam. Applied Energy, 2018

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The steady decrease in the levelized cost of solar energy (LCOE) has made it increasingly cost-competitive against fossil fuels. The cost reduction is supported by a combination of material, device, and system innovations. To this end, bifacial solar farms are expected to decrease LCOE further by increasing the energy yield; but given the rapid pace of design/manufacturing innovations, a cost-inclusive optimization of bifacial PV systems at the farm-level (including land costs) has not been reported. In our worldwide study, we use a fundamentally new approach to decouple energy yield from cost considerations by parameterizing the LCOE formula in terms of “land-related cost” and “module-related cost” to show that an interplay of these parameters defines the optimum design of bifacial farms. For ground-mounted solar panels, we observe that the panels must be oriented horizontally and packed densely for locations with high “land-related cost”, whereas the panels should be optimally tilted for places with high “module-related cost”. For systems with relatively high “module-related costs” and for locations with |latitude| > 30°, the bifacial modules must be tilted ∼10°–15° higher and will reduce LCOE by 2–6% compared to their monofacial counterparts. The results in this paper will guide the deployment of LCOE-minimized ground-mounted tilted bifacial farms around the world.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/65ca5dd436061fc6deaa33fe002d8e23fbf5cda7