Techno-economic analysis of urban bifacial PV in high-latitude area

Bifacial PV technology is attracting attention from both public and academics since it has higher power density and lower levelized cost of electricity (LCoE) when compared to conventional monofacial PV modules. However, due to the complexities of snow effects, there is still lacking detailed analysis for evaluating its techno-economic performance in high latitude areas. This paper aims to provide an overview of the feasibility of urban bifacial PV systems with a Swedish case. Both monofacial and bifacial modules are modeled and compared by considering weather conditions, shading effects, space requirements, and economic factors under two different operation modes. The results imply that bifacial PV systems can produce 9.1–12.8 % more electricity with snow conditions and achieve lower LCoE by 8.8–9.7 % on average. Based on weather conditions in the high-latitude areas, bifacial PV systems show both technical and economic competitiveness compared to monofacial PV. However, self-sufficiency and self-consumption for bifacial PV system are quite similar with around 2 percentage point difference. In addition, though it is potentially profitable over the lifetime, NPV and payback year heavily rely on market conditions, such as electricity prices, discount rates and subsidies.