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

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.1109/JPHOTOV.2022.3201464

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/38487

Share

COinS