An experimental comparative analysis of different PV technologies performance including the influence of hot-arid climatic parameters: Toward a realistic yield assessment for desert locations

In this study, a one-year experiment has been conducted to evaluate the performances of two different photovoltaic technologies: Polycrystalline (pc-Si) and cadmium telluride (CdTe) under a hot desert climate in Mid-south Morocco. For this reason, two PV modules (from each technology) have been exposed and all electrical parameters were monitored for performance comparison. Also, for a realistic comparison, the impact of the climatic parameters, mainly soiling and temperature were taken into consideration. Results show that both technologies have a good performance with a daily Performance Ratio (PR) close to 1 for the pc-Si and around 0.9 for CdTe, but with superiority of 3.5% to the pc-Si technology. The peak daily energy yields are of 7.51 kWh/kWp and 6.99 kWh/kWp for pc-Si and CdTe respectively, with 7% high production for the pc-Si. Nevertheless, the CdTe is less affected by temperature, where the average PR deviation (between the technologies) is 4.37% for temperature values less than 25 °C and 2.35% for temperatures above 25 °C in favor of the CdTe. Regarding soiling, the CdTe shows high performance in comparison to the pc-Si where the daily Soiling Rate reaches 24.6% and 26.9% for both technologies respectively, which causes a drop in the electricity production of 25.5% for the pc-Si and 23.2% for CdTe technology.