Comprehensive ground coverage analysis of large-scale fixed-tilt bifacial photovoltaic plants

Abstract

In the design of large-scale photovoltaic plants, decisions on array pitch and tilt play an essential role in life-cycle economics. These design issues have been studied extensively in traditional monofacial systems. However, bifacial systems, which are in increasing demand, are being studied and face challenges in system modeling, particularly in characterizing rear irradiance. Studies considering bifacial panels in plant layouts are recent and must be extensive. Existing studies are based on computationally intensive software and are limited to specific configurations. This study presents the development and validation of an analytical model of a multirow bifacial photovoltaic plant against Bifacial Radiance and DUET ray-tracing software. Comprehensive ground coverage and array tilt analyses are carried out for all ranges of configuration parameters (clearance height, albedo, collector length, bifaciality, or yield loss) and latitudes of up to 60° using this model. The results of extensive simulations were used to train the artificial neural networks. These mathematical architectures allow easy and fast execution of the proposed model with a slight accuracy loss and are provided in the supplementary material. In-depth analysis and developed tools will facilitate decision-making to obtain photovoltaic layouts more efficiently in terms of energy and economy for large-scale bifacial plants.