Analysis of the Impact of Installation Parameters and System Size on Bifacial Gain and Energy Yield of PV Systems

Amir Asgharzadeh; Tomas Lubenow; Joseph Sink; Bill Marion; Chris Deline; Clifford Hansen; Joshua Stein; Fatima Toor

doi:10.1109/PVSC.2017.8366690

Back

Conference proceeding

Analysis of the Impact of Installation Parameters and System Size on Bifacial Gain and Energy Yield of PV Systems

Amir Asgharzadeh, Tomas Lubenow, Joseph Sink, Bill Marion, Chris Deline, Clifford Hansen, Joshua Stein and Fatima Toor

2017 IEEE 44th Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC), pp.3333-3338

Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC), 44 (Washington, DC, USA, 06/25/2017–06/30/2017)

06/2017

DOI: 10.1109/PVSC.2017.8366690

Files and links (1)

url

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1460255View

Open Access

Abstract

In this work, we present the combined effect of installation parameters (tilt angle, height above ground, and albedo) on the bifacial gain and energy yield of three photovoltaic (PV) system configurations: a single module, a row of five modules, and five rows of five modules utilizing RADIANCE based ray tracing model. We show that optimum tilt angle is dependent on parameters such as height, albedo, size of the system, and time of the year. For a single bifacial module installed in Albuquerque, NM, the optimum tilt angle is lowest (~5°) for summer solstice and highest (~65°) for winter solstice. For larger systems, optimum tilt angle can be up to 20o more than that for a single module system. We also show that modules in large scale systems, generate lower energy due to large shadowing areas cast by the modules on the ground. For albedo of 21 %, middle module in a large array generates up to 7% less energy than a single bifacial module. To validate our model, we utilize measured data from Sandia's fixed tilt bifacial PV testbed and compare it with our simulations. We find that due to higher non-uniformity, lower tilt angles demonstrate high normalized root mean square deviation (NRMSD) between measured and simulated values than high tilt angles.

Clouds

Market Research

Meteorology

Computational modeling

Data models

High Efficiency

Mono

PERC

Sun

System performance

Details

Title: Subtitle: Analysis of the Impact of Installation Parameters and System Size on Bifacial Gain and Energy Yield of PV Systems
Creators: Amir Asgharzadeh - University of Iowa
Tomas Lubenow - University of Iowa
Joseph Sink - University of Iowa
Bill Marion - National Laboratory of the Rockies
Chris Deline - National Laboratory of the Rockies
Clifford Hansen - Sandia National Laboratories
Joshua Stein - Sandia National Laboratories
Fatima Toor - University of Iowa
Resource Type: Conference proceeding
Publication Details: 2017 IEEE 44th Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC), pp.3333-3338
Conference: Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC), 44 (Washington, DC, USA, 06/25/2017–06/30/2017)
DOI: 10.1109/PVSC.2017.8366690
Publisher: IEEE
Language: English
Date published: 06/2017
Academic Unit: Electrical and Computer Engineering; Physics and Astronomy
Record Identifier: 9984197998402771

Metrics

19 Record Views