Volume 12: Low Carbon Cities and Urban Energy Systems: Part I

Experimental investigation on the performance evaluations of the bifacial photovoltaic modules Wenbo Gu, Senji Li, Xing Liu, Zhenwu Chen, Xiaochun Zhang, Tao Ma

Abstract

Bifacial photovoltaic (bPV) technology can output more power than conventional mono-facial PV (mPV) technology by absorbing sunlight from both sides, which attracts increasing attention and its market share is predicted from 15% in 2019 to 70% in 2030. However, there are still no unified plans on what type of the mPV modules should be taken as reference. Therefore, in this study, the similar structure (double glass) of bPV and mPV modules are employed not only validate the previous numerical simulation results, but also to estimate the bPV performance. Furthermore, the daily bPV and mPV electrical and thermal performance is measured and compared under the same conditions. Results show that the bPV modules obviously outperform the mPV modules, and the average bifacial gain can be up to 17.33%. At the same time, the bPV module is cooler than the mPV due to the absence of the back surface field. In addition, some important factors on the bPV performance are discussed by simulation. Results indicates that it is better to install a bPV module with high albedo, elevation, tracking technology at an optimum tilt angle to obtain high power output.

Keywords Bifacial photovoltaic (bPV) modules, Experimental investigation, Performance estimations, Bifacial gain