Replication data for "Optimal tilt angles for bifacial PV plants across Europe based on cumulative sky and TMY data"

This dataset contains the data replication for the article "Optimal tilt angles for bifacial PV plants across Europe based on cumulative sky and TMY data" Apolline Ferry, Mattia Parenti, Martin Thebault, Christophe Ménézo, Marco Fossa, currently under review. In short, it contains maps of Europe which indicates the optimal tilt angle for bifacial photovoltaic plants, for different parameters such as the albedo, and ground coverage value. More sepcically it contains: Images (.png) and shapefile of maps of Europes with the spatial distribution of the optimal angles. A link and the description towards an interactive tool (a jupyter notebook host on binder) allowing to display these maps and to change the settings. A link to the GitHub which contains the jupyter notebook on which is based the interactive tool. Algorithm An algorithm was developed ito determine the optimal tilt angle for south-facing bifacial PV plants (composed of three rows). It uses TMY data from PVGIS and calculates the annual cumulative sky radiance. The irradiation on bifacial PV modules is calculated based on view factors between modules and the ground, as well as between modules and the sky. The optimal tilt angles are calculated at 1° resolution for points uniformly distributed across Europe using a 50 km x 50 km grid. Albedo and GCR are setting parameters of the simulations. Maps The map that were generated are organized according to the study area : Europe or the French Alps. Maps were created to display several variables : the best tilt angle (BT), but also the annual cumulative irradiation received by the central module of the central row (Bk) and the gain in irradiation between using the best tilt angle and tilt angle equal to the latitude (GI). For each region, numerous maps were generated, with one map for each combination of albedo (0.1,0.2,0.3,0.4,0.5) and of GCR (0.05,0.1,0.2,0.3,0.4,0.5,0.7). Additionally, maps with different color scales were created to enable easier comparison between results : independent color scales for each combination (-) or a shared color scale for all the albedo values (norm_albedo) or for all GCR values (norm_GCR) or for all albedo and GCR values together (norm_all). Files The dataset also contains shapefiles with the data used to generate the maps. One file is provided for each study area. Each file includes the values of best tilt angles, annual irradiation and irradiation gain for each combination of GCR and albedo and for each tile of the grid used in the simulations (allowing for the retrieval of exact values instead of images). Webtool A webtool has been created to display the maps based on the selected parameters (study area, GCR, albedo, color scale normalisation). The second part of the webtool allows users to obtain the interpolated value of the best tilt angle for any point in Europe, for any combination of GCR and albedo. An inverse distant weighting method has been used to determine the interpolated value, based on the values of the four nearest points. The interactive webtool can be accessed through a link provided in the file "Link_github_and_interactive_tool_and_description.txt ".