Enhanced Bifacial Gain with Optimized Mountings in Photovoltaic Systems

Abstract

A new design of mounting system targets to reduce the backside shading of ground-mounted fixed-tilt bifacial photovoltaic (PV) systems and improve the bifacial gain has been deployed in a large-scale bifacial PV plant and tested against conventional (nonoptimized) substructures to quantify experimentally, as well as by modeling the improved yield and bifacial gain of bifacial PV plants. This work examines the impact of design changes in purlins, beams, piles, and frames on the bifacial gain. The results show that the optimized mounting systems reduced the backside shading in bifacial PV systems and increased the yearly bifacial gain by at least 0.13% absolute, which is confirmed by simulations and experiments. Depending on the geometrical configuration, low ground coverage ratios, higher albedo, and higher clearance height can lead to a yearly bifacial gain improvement as high as 1% absolute. The quantification of bifacial gain improvement in this study is useful for future studies to determine the profitability of the new design, which comes with additional costs compared to nonoptimized mounting systems.