The Potential of Bifacial Photovoltaics: A Global Perspective

With the rapidly growing interest in bifacial photovoltaics (PV), a worldwide perspective of their performance and design is critical to promote further commercialization of this promising technology. The analysis and optimization of bifacial PV panels in previous literature, however, only focused on either few locations or very specific configurations (e.g., vertical panel). It is not clear how to translate these location- and configuration-specific conclusions to the general prospect of the technology across the globe. In this paper, we present a global study and optimization of bifacial PV at both the single-panel and farm level by our rigorous modeling framework. Our simulation indicates that east-west facing vertically mounted bifacial solar panels can outperform conventional south-north facing bifacial panels at zero elevation (ground-mounted) up to the latitude of 30°. For vertical bifacial solar farms, the optimal row-to-row pitch is also found to be ~1 m for 1 m high panel in the region where the vertical installation produces more electricity.