Energy efficiency evaluation of building integrated photovoltaic systems with different power configurations

The photovoltaic (PV) modules used in the building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) system generally are installed in different orientations and angles. The performance of them is easily to be affected by partial shadows and mismatch of their electrical parameters. Some high performance power configurations have been proposed to solve these problems. This paper presents an energy efficiency analysis method to evaluate the energy efficiencies of BIPV systems with different power configurations. The principles and performance of seven types of power configurations for BIPV systems are discussed. The energy efficiency analysis model of each BIPV power configuration is built, and the simulation results of each configuration under different partial shade and electrical parameter mismatch conditions are presented to quantitatively evaluate their energy efficiencies. The evaluation results show that the AC module and photovoltaic DC building module is the optimal configuration since they have better anti-shading and anti-mismatch performances than the other power configurations.