Urban environment and solar PV performance: The case of the Netherlands

Panagiotis Moraitis*, Bala Bhavya Kausika, Nick Nortier, Wilfried Van Sark

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

The modern urban landscape creates numerous challenges for the deployment of solar Photovoltaic (PV) technology. The large structures that dominate the skyline of every city create compactness, which, in turn, limits the available rooftop area and creates unpredicted shading patterns. The majority of research today relies on modern applications such as geographical information system (GIS) software to evaluate urban morphology; however, this approach is computationally intensive and therefore it is usually limited to a small geographical area. In this paper, we approach this issue from another perspective, utilizing the enormous amount of high resolution PV yield data that is available for the Netherlands. Our results not only correlate performance losses with urban compactness indicators, but they also reveal a significant seasonality effect that can reach 15% in some cases.

Original languageEnglish
Article numberen11061333
Pages (from-to)1333
JournalEnergies
Volume11
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2018

Funding

Funding: This project is partly financially supported by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO). Acknowledgments: This work is part of the International Energy Agency—Photovoltaic Power Systems (IEA-PVPS) Task 13 “Performance and Reliability of Photovoltaic Systems”; we would like to thank all members of this task for their support.

Keywords

  • GIS
  • Performance ratio
  • Population density
  • PV module
  • System
  • Urban compactness

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