Engineering-oriented review of photovoltaic cooling technologies: From performance metrics to strategy selection

Abstract

The operating temperature of photovoltaic (PV) modules strongly affects electrical efficiency, reliability, and lifetime, yet existing thermal management solutions remain fragmented and difficult to translate into practical deployment. This review presents an engineering-oriented synthesis of PV cooling technologies, shifting the focus from isolated temperature reduction to system-level performance, deployability, and sustainability. Cooling strategies are systematically categorized into active, passive, environment-driven, and hybrid approaches, and evaluated using unified metrics including temperature reduction (typically ~3–50 °C), net energy gain (up to ~25% under favorable conditions), parasitic energy consumption, resource footprint, reliability, and technology readiness level (TRL 2–8).Based on this systematic categorization and evaluation, a decision-oriented cooling strategy selection framework is proposed to bridge the gap between laboratory-scale demonstrations and real-world deployment by linking climate conditions, installation constraints, and system objectives with scenario-matched cooling solutions. By explicitly addressing the fragmented nature of existing studies, this work reframes PV cooling as a multi-objective engineering design problem rather than a single-metric optimization task. The proposed framework provides actionable guidance for selecting and integrating cooling strategies across diverse PV applications and highlights future directions toward scalable, reliable, and resource-efficient photovoltaic thermal management.