BifacialSimu: Holistic Simulation of large-scale Bifacial Photovoltaic Systems

Due to the ongoing anthropogenic climate change and a global effort to switch energy production from fossil sources to renewable energies, bifacial photovoltaic (PV) markets are recently growing (Fischer et al., April 2021). In this context, the consideration of bifacial PV in simulation programs is gaining importance in research and engineering sectors. Bifacial PV can absorb solar radiation arriving on the front side as well as on the rear side of a PV module and use it to generate electricity, which increases the overall efficiency and energy yield of a PV module of the same area compared to monofacial PV. Because of the significant impact of the rear side irradiance on energy yield in bifacial PV, the inclusion of exact albedo simulation, which indicates the light reflectivity of a surface (usually the ground) is indispensable. The bifacial simulation program BifacialSimu, a Python package developed at the University of Applied Sciences Cologne (Germany), calculates the energy yield of a bifacial PV system based on a variety of simulation models, which the user is able to select. Moreover, it offers the option to use a constant, time-variable (Chiodetti et al., June 2016) or geometric spectral albedo (Ziar et al., 2019) to calculate the light reflectivity of the ground surface. The energy yield can be calculated using two different electrical models (Singh et al., 2014).