Catching Rays: How Bifacial_Radiance Sheds Light on the Future of Solar PV

Conference · Thu Aug 29 04:00:00 EDT 2024

OSTI ID:2439550

Ovaitt, Silvana; Deline, Chris

The challenge of energy transition is immediate and immense, with current projections targeting 75 TW of photovoltaics (PV) capacity globally by 2050. Alongside the rapid deployment is the "solar-coaster" ride the PV industry experiences with evolving technologies and novel installation methods. In 2016, NREL developed bifacial_radiance, a python open-source modeling tool for bifacial PV. This tool is a wrapper of the raytracing engine Radiance, which you all know better than us at this workshop. Bifacial_radiance integrates the many characteristics of common PV systems to model irradiance on both the front and rear sides of bifacial PV technology - a technology that now represents 75% of utility-scale deployment in the US. Bifacial_radiance has been pivotal for understanding bifacial system performance, shading, and edge effects, and now agrivoltaics research. It has also helped develop simplified models used in PV due diligence tools for optimizing new deployments or evaluating the performance of existing projects. Now, it's the go-to comparison tool for many university, and industry-developed systems modeling tools, and a pivotal tool for further research in photovoltaics. This talk will cover the needs bifacial_radiance addresses as an open-source tool, its development path, and the opportunity for any raytracer to shine light on the solar industry through research and practical application of modeling in regular site installations and novel setups like agrivoltaics and vertical panels at high latitudes (and even the South Pole!).

• Research Organization: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office, Durable Modules Consortium (DuraMAT)
• DOE Contract Number: AC36-08GO28308
• OSTI ID: 2439550
• Report Number(s): NREL/PR-5K00-91122; MainId:92900; UUID:e808747e-f6c2-4c89-95e8-de8c3b412f35; MainAdminId:73557
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

ENGINEERING
SOLAR ENERGY
SAM
SMARTS
agrivoltaics
albedo
bifacial PV
bifacial_radiance
high-latitude
irradiance
modeling
pySMARTS
radiance
raytracer
raytracing
vertical PV
view factor