Bifacial Technology Performance Compared With Three Commercial Monofacial PV Technologies under Outdoor High Irradiance Conditions at the Atacama Desert

A research station for photovoltaics purposes was installed under outdoor high irradiance conditions during 8 months at the Atacama Desert: a meteorological station, two IV tracers connected to two PV modules in order to study the soiling phenomena and four IV tracers connected to monocrystalline, polycrystalline, thin film and bifacial modules. Performance ratio of bifacial technology assuming only the nominal power of the front face reaches 96%, thin film reaches 90%, polycrystalline reaches 88% and monocrystalline reaches 78%. The soiling ratio decreases less than 2.5% during first two months and after it was found a natural cleaning effect due to high humidity that occurs often at early morning and keep the soiling ratio at 0.94 ± 0.01. Further work will be focus on the concept of dew point in order to understand the natural cleaning effects.