Calculating the Energy Yield of Si-Based Solar Cells for Belgium and Vietnam Regions at Arbitrary Tilt and Orientation under Actual Weather Conditions

Abstract

Predicting actual energy harvesting of a photovoltaic (PV) installation as per site-specific conditions is essential, from the customer’s point of view, to choose suitable PV technologies as well as orientations, since most PVs usually have been designed and evaluated under standard illumination. Hence, the tendency lives in the PV community to evaluate the performance on the energy yield and not purely on the efficiency. The major drawback is that weather conditions play an important role, and recording solar spectra in different orientations is an expensive and time-consuming business. We, therefore, present a model to calculate the daily, monthly and annual energy yield of Si-based PV installations included in commercial panels as well as tandem solar cells. This methodology will be used to evaluate the benefit of potential new technologies for domestic and building integrated applications. The first advantage of such a numerical model is that the orientation of solar panels and their properties can be easily varied without extra experiments. The second advantage is that this method can be transferred to other locations since it is based on a minimum of input parameters. In this paper, the energy yield of PV installations for different regions in Belgium and Vietnam will be calculated.