Improving the electricity yield in photovoltaic solar energy long has been a game of incremental additions of new technology. Over the past few years, bifacial panel adoption has been tested at a utility scale, and designs have been refined to the point that a high single-digit gain from a single-axis tracker + bifacial array is bankable. What’s now becoming clear is that using dual-axis tracker technology in place of a single-axis design can yield another 20% gain, albeit only at commercial-scale installations.
However, a third incremental technology gain — engineered reflective albedo — also is now being tested on single-mast dual-axis arrays, with the promise of yet another 10% gain or more, which permits far more solar projects to pencil out a favorable ROI, especially on sloped, irregular or confined land footprints.