Tracking Concepts for High-Density PV Power Plants

In the search for new sites, PV system installations spread out into complex places and contexts, such as hilly terrain, floating PV, and agriPV. It is therefore plausible to assume that PV power plants will increasingly need to use space and thus sunlight more efficiently, e.g. by not wasting solar energy in the space between module rows. This means it may become increasingly important to consider the energy output of PV systems per area of land use, i.e. the "efficiency of the PV system". To increase this efficiency, power plants with high density of PV modules are needed. For tracked systems, this necessitates adapting the tracking strategies as to avoid excessive losses from either row-to-row shading or angle-of-incidence losses in back-tracking. This paper explores different tracking strategies that could contribute to enabling high-density PV power plants with high efficiency. The advantages of these advanced tracking strategies are quantified at two different latitudes as a function of the ground coverage ratio.