Investigating The Impact of Non-Traditional Foreground Surfaces for Solar PV Installations

The current research experimentally investigates the albedo (ground reflectance) of two non-traditional foreground materials (sand and white pebbles) that can be used in solar photovoltaic (PV) applications such as solar farms and Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV). The impact of varying sky conditions such as, overcast (OV), part overcast (POV) and clear (CL) sky is studied in this research. The experimental setup for this research was conducted at Heriot Watt University, U.K. using components such as pyranometers and data logger. From the analysis, it was found that both the materials had specific characteristic behaviour under varying sky conditions (based on movement of clouds). The energy generation from both the materials concluded that white pebbles have a higher energy output as compared to sand under both OV and CL sky conditions. There is a 44.60% and 14.04% difference between both material energy generation under OV and CL sky conditions.