Experimental characterization of the performance of different photovoltaic technologies on water bodies

Long term performance analysis of different PV technologies under the climatic condition of water bodies helps in the selection of appropriate PV technology for the large scale deployment on water bodies. The objective of the present research is to evaluate the suitability of different PV technologies on water bodies using performance and degradation analysis. Therefore, an experimental setup was designed to analyze the performance and degradation of HIT, Poly-Si and CdTe PV technologies on the water surface and to compare their performance and degradation with the respective PV technologies deployed on the land surface. The data from experimental setup was measured for over one year duration. Furthermore, the evaporation reduction in PV panels covered water bodies has been experimentally measured. The performance of HIT and Poly-Si PV panels on the water surface are found to be 0.4% and 2.7% lower than the corresponding land based panels, respectively; whereas the performance of CdTe panel on the water surface is found to be 3.1% higher than corresponding land based panel. The Poly-Si panel has a degradation of 1.32% on the water surface which is significantly higher than the degradation rate of 0.93% of the corresponding land-based panel whereas the HIT panels have almost similar degradation of approximately 0.50% in both climatic conditions. Thus, the study concludes that the HIT and CdTe technologies are suitable for water bodies applications. The experimental results show that the PV panel cover on the water bodies has reduced the evaporation loss by about 29% in one year.