Interlaboratory comparison of angular‐dependent photovoltaic device measurements: Results and impact on energy rating

Abstract

This paper presents the results from an extensive interlaboratory comparison of angular‐dependent measurements on encapsulated photovoltaic (PV) cells. Twelve international laboratories measure the incident angle modifier of two unique PV devices. The absolute measurement agreement is ±2.0% to the weighted mean for angles of incidence (AOI) ≤ 65°, but from 70° to 85°, the range of measurement deviations increases rapidly from 2.5% to 23%. The proficiency of the measurements is analysed using the expanded uncertainties published by seven of the laboratories, and it is found that most of the angular‐dependent measurements are reproducible for AOI ≤ 80°. However, at 85°, one laboratory's measurement do not agree to the weighted mean within the stated uncertainty, and measurement uncertainty as high as 16% is needed for the laboratories without uncertainty to be comparable. The poor agreement obtained at 85° indicates that the PV community should place minimal reliance on angular‐dependent measurements made at this extreme angle until improvements can be demonstrated. The cloud‐based Daidalos ray tracing model is used to simulate the angular‐dependent losses of the mono‐Si device, and it is found that the simulation agrees to the median measurement within 0.6% for AOI ≤ 70° and within 1.4% for AOI ≤ 80°. Finally, the impact that the angular‐dependent measurement deviations have on climate specific energy rating (CSER) is evaluated for the six climates described in the IEC 61853‐4 standard. When one outlier measurement is excluded, the angular‐dependent measurements reported in this work cause a 1.0%–1.8% range in CSER and a 1.0%–1.5% range in annual energy yield, depending on the climate.

Simulation of Colored BIPV Modules Using Angular-Dependent Spectral Responsivity

“…Furthermore, it shows that the RE increases with increasing AOI for most of the samples, while the RE of the gold and control sample at high AOI decreases to less than 1%. The differences of the RE at high AOI shows the strong influence of alignment errors in measurements, which is consistent with the observation in Riedel-Lyngskaer et al [44]. Therefore, the increased RE at a higher AOI can be the result from alignment errors in the lab or in the field.…”

PV Module Energy Rating Standard IEC 61853-3 Intercomparison and Best Practice Guidelines for Implementation and Validation

“…The module power matrix as shown in Table 2 is taken from [19]. The spectral response and angular behavior of module 2 are simulated using the Daidalos cloud ray tracer [20], which demonstrated good agreement with measurements in several studies [21]- [24]. The results shown in red in Figure 2.…”

“…We here recommend to use a least square fit optimization with measurement data and to limit to the range from 0° to 80° incidence angle. Measurements of higher incidence angles are increasingly prone to systematic measurement errors and therefore measurements at 85° should be rejected [24]. In the CSER calculation, the angular loss coefficient should be specified with an accuracy of five digits to prevent the impact of the fitting and rounding on the calculation.…”

Structural and Optical Properties of Vacuum‐Evaporated Mixed‐Halide Perovskite Layers on Nanotextured Black Silicon

“…Furthermore, nanotexturing by BS provides superior reflectance properties over a wide range of incidence angles compared with microtextured solar cells. [35][36][37] For example, Xie et al [35] tested the polarization and angular dependence of BS samples, which showed low reflectance up to a large angle of incidence of 80°. Davidsen et al [36] demonstrated that RIEnanotextured multicrystalline Si solar cells show a 3% point improvement in average-normalized angle-resolved power output compared to microtextured, and the nanotextured monocrystalline Si cells show above 1% point improvement compared to microtextured cells.…”