Optimization and performance of bifacial solar modules: A global perspective
By Xingshu Sun, M. Ryyan Khan, Chris Deline, M. A. Alam. 2017
326 citations recorded by the source corpus.
With the rapidly growing interest in bifacial photovoltaics (PV), a worldwide map of their potential performance can help assess and accelerate the global deployment of this emerging technology. However, the existing literature only highlights optimized bifacial PV for a few geographic locations or develops worldwide performance maps for very specific configurations, such as the vertical installation. It is still difficult to translate these location- and configuration-specific conclusions to a general optimized performance of this technology. In this paper, we present a global study and optimization of bifacial solar modules using a rigorous and comprehensive modeling framework. Our results demonstrate that with a low albedo of 0.25, the bifacial gain of ground-mounted bifacial modules is less than 10% worldwide. However, increasing the albedo to 0.5 and elevating modules 1 m above the ground can boost the bifacial gain to 30%. Moreover, we derive a set of empirical design rules, which optimize bifacial solar modules across the world and provide the groundwork for rapid assessment of the location-specific performance. We find that ground-mounted, vertical, east-west-facing bifacial modules will outperform their south-north-facing, optimally tilted counterparts by up to 15% below the latitude of 30°, for an albedo of 0.5. The relative energy output is reversed in latitudes above 30°. A detailed and systematic comparison with data from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America validates the model presented in this paper.
Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8cb21403448fe94df43d2aa904a0a6e037a7241d
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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- A worldwide cost-based design and optimization of tilted bifacial solar farms (2018, methodology): “[19] have provided a global perspective of bifacial modules with optimized tilt angle, azimuth angle, and elevation.”