Temperature Efficiency Analysis in Photovoltaics Using Basic Geodata: Application to Europe

The fundamental role of temperature in relation to solar cell efficiency in photovoltaic (PV) installations, is well established and documented in the scientific community. Correlation between PV cell temperature and performance efficiency is described generally as a function of climatic and installation conditions, which depend on location and PV panel mounting, respectively. In this paper, we propose a very simple yet efficient mathematical model, which can perform an accurate analysis of temperature-dependent losses in PV installations using well-known geodata, especially latitude. After creating a number of models, the best was applied to 50 different locations in Europe. The maximum absolute estimation difference of the efficiency due to temperature is always within 1.6%, and the mean absolute error within 0.6%, with respect to PVGIS, which is a reference web tool for PV performance assessment.