Featured in TOP notch – 03-2022

Backtracking is becoming smart, but it isn’t magic

Higher energy yields and a better distribution of generation over the day are the two key advantages that explain the success of single-axis trackers for PV generation in sunny places like Southern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, or North America. As the scale of new tracker projects is increasingly reaching hundreds of megawatts, finding suitable large plots of affordable, flat land is not as easy as before. Everoze partner Felipe Canto Teixeira highlights the increased complexity in the design and energy assessment created by more challenging topographies, and discusses solutions based on his on-the-ground experience in hilly Portuguese terrain.

By

pv magazine

07 Mar 2022

As large-scale PV starts to run out of flat land in some markets, developers face an interesting challenge to integrate trackers on hilly terrain, without losing output to shading. | Image: NEXTracker

In the early days of PV projects, system capex was largely determined by PV module costs. Then dual-axis trackers became interesting, since they could increase the yield of a single module by up to 40% compared to a fixed-tilt system. The significantly higher cost of the racking system was largely compensated by the higher energy …

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