Energy generation and temperatures of photovoltaic systems with reflectors: Measurements under typical and extreme weather events

Alex Tanti, Mule’Stagno, Luciano and Daniel Micallef

Renewable Energy, 2025, vol. 249, issue C

Abstract: Reflector surfaces can enhance the performance of Photovoltaics (PVs) through diffuse radiation. PVs are also known to reduce their efficiency as their temperature increases. This study investigates the PV system with reflectors. The novelty of this work is in the study of the combined effect of the reflectors on both the energy output and the thermal effects on the panels across different seasonal settings and extreme weather conditions. An experimental campaign was conducted in a Mediterranean climate in Malta in order to measure the energy generated and backside temperatures from different setups. This method enables real operating conditions to be considered. The tested cases included PVs with various tilt angles, with and without reflectors. The configuration with reflectors having PVs tilted at 30°yielded 15% more energy compared to the no reflector case. An extreme weather event was also studied and reflectors were not found to cause an increase in the PV panel temperature despite the increase in energy generation. These findings provide new insight on the effectiveness of reflectors even during extreme weather events such as heat waves. Future work will focus on enhancing the performance of reflector-PV integration.

Keywords: Photovoltaics; Reflectors; Thermal effects; Extreme weather events; Shading; Passive cooling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148125007694
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:249:y:2025:i:c:s0960148125007694

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2025.123107

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().