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Advanced solar monitoring hardware made in Australia is designed to ensure that solar farms using cutting-edge double-sided solar panels meet their performance goals and have been launched for the first time in solar farms in northeastern New South Wales.

Fulcrum3D has provided its high-tech weather station to the 154MW (DC) Gunnedah Solar Farm, making it the first utility-scale bifacial photovoltaic project in Australia to use the technology and the first fully compliant with the new 2021 international monitoring The standard items are in the double-sided panel.

The Gunnedah project-built by PCL Constructors using double-sided panels and single-axis trackers-joined the grid west of Tamworth in the middle of this year and began to pass a series of "holding points" on the road to full power generation.

The use of double-sided solar panels combined with sun tracking technology is becoming more and more popular among large-scale project developers to capture and convert as much sun rays as possible, including rays reflected from the ground.

The manufacturer promises that, under appropriate circumstances, double-sided panels can provide 5% to 20% of additional power output-the percentage gain may be affected by the location of the solar power generation site on the land and the change of reflection angle in different seasons.

Paying close attention to these commitments is the new international standard-IEC 61724-1 (2nd edition)-which introduced monitoring requirements for bifacial solar systems in July this year, which involves accurately determining the performance of the back of the panel.

Fulcrum3D CEO Dr. Colin Bonner told RenewEconomy this is not a trivial matter. In fact, due to the shading pattern, installation structure, surface characteristics and seasonal changes, the new standard emphasizes the difficulty of accurately determining this backside solar resource.

"For a typical single-sided panel, you only need to observe the sunlight passing through the atmosphere and hitting each panel," Bonner said.

"For double-sided panels, you also need to consider how sunlight interacts with the ground and the photovoltaic array itself before illuminating the back of the panel.

"Using double-sided panels can get more location-specific differences, which is why monitoring is much more complicated, because the near-Earth scattering on the back of the panel may change within the row or cluster of solar power plants-even seasonal .

"For example, if you have a rainy season with beautiful green grass, the scattering coefficient will be different compared to red dust," Bonner told RE.

Fulcrum3D's solar monitoring station-the company actually started with a wind farm monitoring solution-combines standard parameters with direct and diffuse irradiance quantification, which is a real-time IV curve through a "spectrum matching" reference panel Tracking achieved.

"The Fulcrum3D IV curve pollution station aims to obtain the complete trajectory of the IV curve to estimate the pollution loss of the short-circuit current and measure the uniform pollution on the panel through the maximum power point measurement," the media statement explained.

"The hardware can be directly transferred to the dual-panel monitoring in a dual-sided system to separate the front and rear lighting."

Bonner said that the meteorological condition data of the entire solar farm will be provided to SCADA [Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition] in real time and used for grid connection requirements and on-site short-term forecasts.

All these add up, especially when you are financing, constructing, commissioning, and contracting output for a large grid-connected solar project that can generate hundreds of gigawatt-hours of energy each year.

"[Accurate bifacial solar monitoring] is actually very important for your production evaluation," Bonner said.

"Then it started to drive the actual solar farm design itself. So if you get an extra 10% or 20% of the back illuminance on the back of the panel, you will get about 6% of the energy per year.

"The extra current from the back lighting will affect your cable size, combiner box and cable infrastructure. There are also options to optimize array installation and layout to increase back yield. Accurate field monitoring can verify the initial desktop design of the solar farm .

"So this is where we are going... This is a fast-changing industry, and the assets under construction now will be the key to ensuring our long-term future returns in 2050. Therefore, the solar farms that are being constructed now follow It is very important to build correctly to the best standards so that the project can maintain a stable long-term investment," he said.

Sophie is the editor of One Step Off The Grid and the associate editor of its sister site Renew Economy. For more than ten years, Sophie has been writing articles about clean energy.

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