Tuning electricity generation throughout the year with PV module technology

Currently, photovoltaic (PV) installations target a maximization of annual energy yield. In the future however, electricity generation may need to match better with the load profiles in a given environment and climate. In particular this will be a challenge for generation across the seasons, where electrical storage is less suitable, and in the built environment, where wind turbines for generation are much more difficult to integrate.

In this paper we discuss how this challenge may be addressed with climate- and consumption-specific PV module technology. In particular, we demonstrate how the temperature coefficient of a PV system can impact the energy yield throughout the year. After explaining the concept, we apply our electrical-optical-thermal model to do very accurate physics-based bottom-up simulations in different climates. As such, depending on the climate and latitude, a higher temperature coefficient of the PV module may lead to higher energy yields, mostly during the colder season. We also demonstrate that, if higher temperature coefficients are accompanied by improved low-light performance (tunable using the module’s series resistance), the seasonal gain can be much higher. We indicate the relevance of our assumptions by basing the module performance in the simulations on (datasheets of) commercial modules.