Effects of shadowing on to photovoltaic module performance

A procedure of simulation and modelling PV modules' performance, working partially shadowed, is presented. Several shadow rates have been tested on a single cell forming part of a PV module having 36 solar cells serially connected, and the influence of shadow rate in most of the important PV module characteristic parameters has been evaluated. The correlation between PV module output lowering due to shadowing and the variation of resistive losses is also reported. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.