Performance Monitoring and Evaluation of a CIGS Roof-Integrated Photovoltaic System under the Unique Tropical Environment of Darwin, Northern Territory

Building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) technologies are gaining interest from
both the research community and the building industry due to their versatile capability to be incorporated to both old and new building designs. From the literature, not much research was done on investigating real-world performance assessment of Copper Indium Gallium di-Selenide (CIGS) thin-film systems in a tropical locale. This paper addresses this gap. The Northern Territory (NT) was chosen to conduct this study due to its unique climate; a distinct wet and dry cycle and a cyclone-prone environment. The objective of this research is to evaluate the performance of a 1.5kWp CIGS BIPV system under these real-world environmental effects; dust accumulation, fauna droppings, natural shading and rig temperature. 5-minute measured data were obtained, over 4 months, and three clear sunny days (each for every month) were identified for analysis. Experimental results showed a qualitative relationship between the aforementioned environmental effects on the system efficiency. In particular, the effect of dust accumulation and bird droppings were the two identified dominant causes of the gradual decrease in the expected peak power output of the system. The effects of natural shading and temperature on the system efficiency were also presented in this paper. This study forms a solid foundation for further studies of the environmental effects on PV efficiency . This work is important due to the increasing uptake of PV systems in the NT and the understandings of the see environmental effects enable such PV systems to be maintained efficiently.