COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BETWEEN BIFACIAL AND MONOFACIAL SOLAR PANELS USING PV*SOL SOFTWARE

Abstract

Traditional solar panels commonly used in today’s solar power projects are monofacial i.e., with solar cells only
on one side of the panels. Recently, many solar panel producers have improved their panel designs by introducing
so-called bifacial solar panels which feature solar cells on both sides of the solar panel. Producers claim that the
bifacial solar panels, regarding energy generation, typically overperforms the traditional monofacial solar panels
by about 5.5%, with additional investment cost between 10% and 25%, which strongly depends on the producer
and the size of the project.
In this paper, the authors made a simulation and comparative analysis between bifacial and monofacial solar
panels using PV*SOL simulation software. The simulation was done on a solar power project with an installed
capacity of 1 MW using exact solar insolation values for the exact geographical location. Typical bifacial and
monofacial half-cell solar panels available at the local market were used for the analysis. For enhancing the
analysis, two common placements of the panels were utilized, ground placement, and rooftop placement parallel
with the roof at the same inclination (pitch) and orientation (azimuth). Obtained results using PV*SOL simulation
software for both panels and both placements are presented with accompanying discussion. For ground
placement, bifacial solar panels resulted in increased energy generation of approximately 2.5%, while for rooftop
placements the amount of the increased energy generation was negligible. Ground-placed bifacial solar panels
have increased energy generation all year around, while rooftop bifacial solar panels provide larger energy
generation only during summer months, from June to August. For the rest of the year the energy generation
difference, although in favor of bifacial over monofacial solar panels, was still negligible