Reduction of Dust and Temperature Effects on PV Performance in Qatar and the Gulf Region

Qatar aims to derive 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 to promote sustainability and energy efficiency. The country faces challenges with solar panels due to harsh weather conditions, primarily dust, and high temperatures. An often-neglected problem is the contamination of PV surfaces, so-called “soiling” which leads to significantly reduced energy yields, especially in high-insolation arid and semi-arid climates. Indeed, an inadequate or absent soiling mitigation strategy in high solar-potential and soiling-prone locations such as the Middle East can cancel out in few weeks the surge in solar cell and concentrated solar power (CSP) efficiency improvement made in recent years. This would potentially render an installation economically unviable and therefore must be mitigated. This study proposes two approaches to mitigate soiling, namely, hydrophobic coating and flipping. Interestingly, results show that the coating and flipping approach have increased power generation by about 11% compared to non-coated, non-flipped panels. Further research is needed to elucidate these results.