Climate conditions affect solar cell performance more than expected

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"We've explored the convergence of two things, location

and technology, to come up with a framework for predicting solar panel ," says senior author Tonio Buonassisi, an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. "If you have a new solar technology, you can see where your technology might be able to outcompete commercial silicon ."
To demonstrate how their framework works, the researchers combined real data from solar  located in the United States (Perrysburg, Ohio) and Singapore with 1 year of satellite weather data to map where solar cells would work best outdoors. With this data, they analyzed two : silicon (commonly used in solar cells) and cadmium telluride (thin-film competitor material).
The researchers found that the cadmium telluride solar cells produced up to 5% more energy than silicon ones in the hot, humid Singaporean location. Similar trends can be expected for other materials with a higher electronic band gap like gallium arsenide or metal-halide perovskites.
"Tools used by developers to predict energy yields of solar panels and plan solar systems are often expensive and inaccurate," says first author Ian Marius Peters, a research associate at the MIT Photovoltaics Research Laboratory (@MITPVLab). "They're inaccurate because they were developed for temperate climates like the United States, Europe, and Japan."


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-climate-conditions-affect-solar-cell.html#jCp