From pv magazine France.
How to measure power output from bifacial PV panels is a recurrent question for the solar industry.
The Institut National de l'Énergie Solaire (Ines) division of France’s national low-carbon energy Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA) has suggested: “The characterization of a bifacial module cannot be limited to the standard measurement of the performance of its front face. The rear face must also be measured to define the bifaciality and to estimate the effective power of the module according to different albedos.”
And the CEA knows what it is talking about, too, according to the results of a two-year exercise carried out by the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (Seris), which processed the results of tests carried out by 25 global laboratories on eight reference bifacial products, in order to assess the testing methods of the research centers and certification bodies in question.
“CEA-Ines has been able to verify that the reliability of its measurements and methods for characterizing bifacial photovoltaic modules is equal to that of the recognized certification institutes worldwide,” said the organization, following the results of Seris’ ‘round-robin’ exercise. The institute added: “A guarantee of the quality and reliability of the gains announced by its laboratories.”
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Under the Seris program, the bifacial lab testing was carried out on reference panels made by Chinese manufacturers Longi Solar, Jinko Solar, Jinergy and Linyang Photovoltaic and Sino-Canadian company Canadian Solar, in accordance with the IEC TS 60904-1-2 standard.
Other participating laboratories included the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory; the EU’s Joint Research Center; German trio Fraunhofer-ISE, TÜV-Rheinland and PI-Berlin; Dutch research institute the TNO; Seris itself; PI-China; Switzerland’s CSEM- EPFL; and Australia’s Csiro.
Since participants were bound by confidentiality, no further details about the results were released, despite requests from pv magazine.
This article was amended on 15/06/20 to indicate no further results of the round-robin exercise were available and to amend the quote from CEA-Ines to replace the words “up to” with “equal” and “results” with “gains”.
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At Quest Renewables, we are receiving more and more requests to engineer bifacial panels with our carport systems. I would love to read more about the results from the study. Is there a report available?