Dear community,

I'm looking for an option to automatically allocate a determined area according to maximum PV yield, rather than to maximize PV yield per module. This means I'd like to tolerate shading as long as the yield (considering wiring) is still higher than before, because we can put more modules per area reducing the row spacing. I assume this works for a while but at some point the "trend breaks" and at some point, the influence of the shading becomes greater than the gain from increasing the number of modules.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any option to do that and so it's really annoying to investigate this manually, calculating shading and peak power for each setup.

This can still be economically reasonable, if the energy demand of the site is much higher than the available area for PV, so that most of PV energy goes into self consumption. And of course also reasonable in terms of energy transition.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best regards, Florian

Hi Florian Wendler,

welcome to the forum! At the moment, PV*SOL does not provide optimization algorithms where you can select the target parameter. I assume you are thinking of putting a higher investment per area to achieve higher yields during periods of high radiation. To give an example, here is a photo from 2019 at a german Autobahn:

I don't know for sure but it seems shading losses in winter, spring and fall are tolerated to maximize area usage.

This is a very interesting optimization technique we also thought about internally and I put it on the list. Unfortunately you have to do it manually for now.

Best regards and thank you for the input!
Frederik

Hi Florian and Martin,

I've done this optimization through trial and error (for Sweden though but I expect the broader results to be the same everywhere).

The very broad conclusion that I've found is that if you want as much production as possible on a given area you should do a low tilted east/west system rather that a south facing one. Doing a 10° tilted east/west basically allows you to have 0 spacing without significant shading losses.

My simulations on this roughly show that an east/west system will give about 40% more production compared with an (almost?) optimal south facing system. And the kWh/kWp is about 10-15% lower on an east/west compared to south facing with "acceptable" row spacing.