Optimal Row Spacing for Monofacial and Bifacial Fixed-Tilt and Tracked Photovoltaic Systems Up to 75°N
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The inter-row spacing of photovoltaic arrays is an influential design parameter that impacts both a system' energy yield and land-use. Optimization of PV arrays within a constrained area is required, and rule-of-thumb approaches to row spacing which focus solely on eliminating shading for conventional monofacial fixed-tilt PV arrays may not be appropriate. Here, we quantify how variations in ground coverage ratio (GCR) between 0-1 for fixed-tilt and horizontal single-axis tracked (HSAT) monofacial and bifacial PV arrays affect the amount of energy yield lost due to inter-row shading between latitudes of 17-75°N. We additionally optimize the tilt of fixed-tilt systems for these latitudes and GCRs. We demonstrate that fixed-tilt and HSAT arrays located >55°N require similar land-use, while for low-to-moderate latitudes marginal changes in GCR result in significant changes to shading loss for HSAT arrays compared to fixed-tilt arrays. For example, a shift in GCR from 0.3 to 0.4 in Tuxtla Gutierrez at 17°N increases the percent of module energy yield lost to inter-row shading effects by 0.5% abs. for a fixed-tilt array compared to 2.4% abs. for a HSAT array. We additionally calculate that bifacial PV arrays require GCRs lower by 0.03 on average than monofacial arrays to achieve the same shading loss, regardless of tracking type.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it