Sponsor
Funding Agency: 10.13039/100000015-U.S. Department of Energy 10.13039/100006134-Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy 10.13039/100011883-Solar Energy Technologies Office (Grant Number: DE-EE0008168) Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC 10.13039/100006233-National Renewable Energy Laboratory 10.13039/100000015-U.S. Department of Energy (Grant Number: DE-AC36-08GO28308)
Published In
IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-6-2022
Subjects
Photovoltaic power generation -- Industrial applications, Photocatalysis -- Photosensitizer
Abstract
Accuracy in photovoltaic (PV) module temperature modeling is crucial to achieving precision in energy performance yield calculations and subsequent economic evaluations of PV projects. While there have been numerous approaches to PV temperature modeling based on both the steady-state and transient thermal assumptions, there have been few attempts to account for changing convective cooling on PV module surfaces resulting from changes in the PV system layout. Changes in system row spacing, in particular, can have a meaningful impact on module electrical efficiency and subsequent economic performance, even when considering additional costs from the changes in row spacing. Using a heat transfer approach based on the spatial definition of a PV array, technoeconomic analyses of different plant configurations are presented here that show an improved system levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for fixed-tilt PV systems when increasing system row spacing. These LCOE improvements have been found to be as high as 2.15% in climates characterized by low ambient temperatures and higher average annual wind speeds in U.S. climates. While the LCOE improvements are primarily driven by incident irradiance changes for altered row spacing, the waterfall analysis of the different components of changing system LCOE show that modifications in the heat transfer dynamics have a 0.5% contribution to the LCOE reduction for the largest LCOE, compared with a 3.3% reduction from irradiance changes.
Rights
Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1109/JPHOTOV.2022.3201464
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/38487
Citation Details
Prilliman, M., Smith, S. E., Stanislawski, B. J., Keith, J. M., Silverman, T. J., Calaf, M., & Cal, R. B. (2022). Technoeconomic Analysis of Changing PV Array Convective Cooling Through Changing Array Spacing. IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.