PV Collectors on Building Walls in Urban Environment

Buildings located in highly urbanized areas have not been considered for photovoltaic (PV) deployment on building walls due to limitation of ground and rooftops space. As the need for increasing energy demand due to population growth in cities, and the advancements in the efficiency of semi-transparent (ST-PV) solar cell technology, the integration of ST-PV modules into building windows, become feasible. The present article proposes a novel methodology for calculating the incident solar energy on PV vertical modules deployed on building walls and windows facing the southern direction and obscured by a nearby building in front. The present work analyses analytically, for the first time, the incident energy and its distribution on PV vertical modules along a wall height. Monthly and annually direct beam, diffuse and global energies are calculated for different wall height, building separation and orientation. The results shows, for example, that both the front and rear building walls receive the same amount of annual direct beam energy 913 kWh/m2 for a distance 25 m between the buildings. Decreasing the distance from 25 m to 10 m, decreases the annual incident global energy on the rear-building wall by 15 %.