Experimental validation of a dynamic double-layer photovoltaic installation for enhanced energy production per unit of occupied land area

Large-scale photovoltaic deployment requires solutions that increase electricity production per unit of occupied land area. This study presents and validates through on-field tests a dynamic double-layer photovoltaic instal- lation, consisting of two vertically stacked bifacial layers occupying the same land area of a conventional single- layer installation. The two stacked layers are capable of independent solar tracking. A custom-built scaled prototype with twelve rotating bifacial modules and independent current sensing was operated on field under three different operation modes and compared with a conventional single-layer installation occupying the same ground area. The most efficient operation mode, which has the top layer dynamically tracking the sun and the bottom layer fixed, achieved a gain of about +42% relative to a monofacial single-layer installation and +27% relative to a bifacial one, while a more simple open-loop tracking strategy based on a five-parameter sigmoid yielded gains close to +39% and +25% with negligible loss compared with closed-loop optimal control. The proposed installation is in principle agnostic with respect to the cell technology adopted and scalable from compact dynamic modules to utility-scale and agrivoltaic applications.