Bifacial Solar Panels Performance in Alaska Revealed

Bifacial photovoltaic modules are increasingly being used in solar arrays worldwide. This trend is true in Alaska. Last summer, Kotzebue, located 30 miles above the Arctic Circle, installed the largest rural solar array to date using bifacial modules.

A new paper by the ACEP Solar Technology team, titled “Field Performance of South-Facing and East-West Facing Bifacial Modules in the Arctic,” reveals new Alaska-specific bifacial performance data from the ACEP Solar Photovoltaic Test Site on the UAF campus in Fairbanks. Testing showed bifacial gains of 21% between south-facing bifacial and monofacial modules.

In addition, the paper discusses how the unique conditions in Alaska and other northern environments, such as early and late-season snow coverage and extreme solar azimuth angles in the summer, create opportunities for unique module orientations that might produce energy that is more in line with community demand. The paper can be downloaded here.

This research was funded by the Office of Naval Research and the Alaska Regional Collaboration for Technology Innovation and Commercialization (The ARCTIC Program).

For more information on this research, please contact Chris Pike at cpike6@alaska.edu.

 

An image of ACEP's solar test site taken from the research paper.