Urban climate and photovoltaic performance

A photovoltaic module in a dense, warm city does not behave like the same module on a test bench. Quantifying that gap matters for anyone sizing an urban installation.

Photovoltaic output falls as cell temperature rises. Cities are warmer than their surroundings, mounting configurations trap heat to different degrees, and the climate itself is changing. Each of these shifts the yield an installation will actually deliver.

This work maps urban heat islands at territorial scale using unsupervised learning, then couples that thermal environment to electrical and thermal models of photovoltaic systems — in Geneva, in the Greater Sydney area, and across French cities under climate change scenarios. Related strands look at the boundary conditions of floating photovoltaics, at optimal tilt angles for bifacial plants across Europe, and at where the uncertainty in a predicted hourly yield really comes from.