how to simulate the back-contact solar cell module performance?

[Chen]

Hi, PVsyst team:

     As in the past year or two, there have been some new solar cell technologies in the photovoltaic industry, such as BC cells. Photovoltaic leaders Longi and Aiko are both researching and selling them. Can the current PVsyst model simulate the yield performance of this solar module well, especially the advantage of local shadow shading promoted by manufacturers, especially in mountainous areas, distributed roofs, wind and solar complementary scenes, etc. This advantage is due to the BC's lower breakdown voltage..  If his performance cannot be well simulated, are there any other reference methods ？ thanks! 

[Bruno Wittmer]

Currently PVsyst handles PV modules with IBC cells in the same way as other crystalline Si modules.

We have looked into this issue, and to our understanding, the shading advantage of this technology is limited to situations where only a few (1-4) PV cells of a substring in a PV module are shaded, while the other cells are fully illuminated. We estimate, that these situations happen so rarely, that neglecting this effect will not lead to significant errors in the yearly yield calculation.

Nevertheless, we intend to include the special behavior of IBC cells into our models, in order to account for this small improvement. The current roadmap foresees the availability of this feature by end of this year.

[Chen]

OK thanks.