The prospect of double-sided enhancements is expected to shift rapidly to industry adoption, especially for tracker-based projects. The International Solar Technology Roadmap (ITRPV) produced by German VDMA company predicts that by 2020, double-sided modules will account for 10% of the global market share of soalr modules and more than 30% by 2028.

"All smart panel buyers now buy both sides," confirmed Steven Zhu, president of Trina Solar USA. He points out that Trina has been testing dual panels with partners from the United States and China.

Although the dual panels represent the key technology of albedo capture energy generation, tracker technology and smarter inverters are the supporting vehicles needed to maximize double-sided gain. Given the much larger granularity of double-sided operational data, solar designers find it no longer necessary, or at least substantially less, to overbuild systems to insure a given output than single-sided systems.

"Bifacial is not just about upgrading, it's about using fewer DC devices to achieve goals," said Peter Johnson, Senior Project Engineer at AWS Truepower, the latest acquisition of Underwriters Laboratory consultancy. "For a two-sided project, the DC-AC ratio is reduced by about 5% to achieve the optimal inverter limit loss," he said. "The two-sided advantage of 3% to 9% is usually seen as a combination of DC capacity cost reduction and energy gain."

AWS Truepower advocates extensive field testing of albedo measurements to achieve acceptable two-sided performance modeling. AWS found that in-situ albedo and diffuse reflectance level measurements can reduce the uncertainty of the back array plane (POA). "A 3% increase (or decrease) in albedo leads to a 1% increase (or decrease) in total POA," Johnson points out.

Based on recent field tests of double panels in Illinois and Texas, AWS found that the simulated albedo may be 2% to 5% different from the measured albedo. In the process, AWS concluded that "the back energy contribution may be uncertain between 20% and 40%", which means that the modeling uncertainty may still be too high to continue unless conservative value-added is assumed.

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