The effect of spectral albedo in bifacial photovoltaic performance

Abstract

This paper analyzes 15-months of spectral albedo measurements collected at the Technical University of Denmark (55.6°N, 12.1°E). High-resolution spectroradiometers are used to monitor four albedo scenarios, which include green vegetation, dry vegetation, gravel, and snow. Spectral mismatch and spectral impact are calculated for the front and backside of three different bifacial cell concepts mounted on horizontal single axis trackers and fixed-tilt substructures. The spectral nature of albedo is shown to have significant influence on bifacial photovoltaic performance wherein backside spectral impact as high as 1.20 is observed for fixed-tilt systems above green vegetation and as low as 0.98 for systems above snow. The results reveal that spectral impact is always lower on tracked than fixed-tilt systems because a greater fraction of sky diffuse light reaches the backside of tracked systems. Given the variety of albedos tested here, we find that the normalized difference vegetation index is a good predictor of backside spectral effects. When the high-resolution measurements are truncated to 4 to 8 carefully selected wavelengths, we find that this limited measurement resolution sufficiently captures the seasonal spectral albedo fluctuations that influence bifacial photovoltaic energy production. Finally, to alleviate the dearth of spectral datasets presently available to the PV community, the spectral irradiance and albedo measurements are made freely available in open access format (https://doi.org/10.11583/DTU.14695437.v1).