Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The performance of photovoltaic (PV) solar cells is influenced by solar irradiance as well as temperature.
7. Conclusion In this review we have discussed the possibility to harvest the infrared part of the solar irradiation at the ground level with different materials and systems, such as multijunction solar cells, inorganic-organic perovskite solar cells, organic solar cells, quantum dot solar cells and upconverting materials based solar cells.
Another important parameter that needs to be considered for understanding solar irradiance on the earth’s surface is the clearness index (K T ). Particularly, K T is defined by the ratios of the solar radiation for a particular day and the extraterrestrial solar radiation for that day. It could also be defined by hourly as shown below:
The effect of solar spectral irradiation on the yield of several PV technologies has been documented by Nann and Emery at four separate locations [ 51 ]. Eke et al., on the other hand, found that the spectrum variance had a very limited effect on the low bandgap absorber content in PV solar cells [ 52 ].
In recent years, solar energy technology has emerged as one of the leading renewable energy technologies currently available. Solar energy is enabled by the solar irradiance reaching the earth. Here we describe the characteristics of solar irradiance as well as the sources of variation.
It should be noticed that the module with a higher leakage current is highly affected by low irradiance. Since a-Si solar cells inherently have high defect density and/or high leakage current than c-Si solar cells, thus the power gain by c-Si at very low irradiance is significantly higher than a-Si as discussed in the above section.