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Vertical also doesn't take up very much real estate.


if you put up just one row and don't mind the shadow


You mean like a privacy fence?


Sort of, but if you use it as a fence you'd need to ensure nothing casts shadow on it.


It's more that you have to manage shading to happen in a way that the module's structure and your array-combining wiring/circuit effectively contain the shading impact to be closer to proportional to the overall shaded area than to causing more catastrophic loss (an individual solar cell in a module will be wired/biased as a blocking diode that's merely photoconductive from the limited light it receives unless bypass diodes are integrated into the module). E.g., usage of power optimizers, modules/panels with cell&bypass-diode arrangements that work to effectively target and mitigate the shading patterns you experience (e.g. a wall getting shaded when the sun sets below the horizon formed by neighbor's roofs), and such.

Partial-shading-tolerance designed modern panels will quite happily tank partial shading, and as long as you keep the shading aligned in the design direction of the panel you will have within ~30% of the usual efficiency (i.e., still like 14% instead of the usual 20%) relative to the remaining irradiation that your panel is still receiving after the shading took it's chunk.

Just take care to ensure the shading conditions for all panels that are passively combined into an array are sufficiently same, or at least behave in a way that the modules can bypass effectively to not loose an unshaded panel's yield due to one panel in the group having some shade on it.




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