2023ICERD8-C27 -- The Impact of Wind Speed and Direction on Performance Assessment of Photovoltaic Modules for Different Climatic Conditions

The increasing climate change concern necessitated renewable and sustainable energy resources as an alternative to fossil fuels. Energy from solar photovoltaic (PV) is cheapest among all renewable sources in terms of cost and time to start a project. The performance assessment of PV projects is mainly based on solar radiation and temperature. Current performance assessments do not account for wind direction, panel geometry and panel orientation in their models so it is important to include the effect of these parameters in the performance assessment. This study aims to perform assessment of PV modules by suggesting an improved methodology incorporating environmental and geometric parameters affecting the output. Six parameters (three environmental and three geometrical) are coupled with four different heat transfer models for estimating performance parameters of PV modules under varying conditions. The performance is evaluated in terms of the module performance ratio. The results showed that wind direction and panel orientation play an important role in determining the module surface temperature, and hence affect the performance of the module. Sensitivity analysis of the models indicated that in addition to the tilt angle and wind speed, the performance of module is also dependent on the incoming wind direction. The performance of PV module predicted by accounting for these parameters is also shown to be dependent on the model used for modelling the heat transfer characteristics. These results suggest that the performance assessment of solar technologies should be done by considering climatic and geometric parameters for a more realistic assessment.