Oman Using Bifacial Solar Panels In Giant 500 MW Solar Farm

Oman may not be the first country you think of when you think of solar power giants, but just like everywhere else in the world, solar simply makes sense — and the country certainly has a lot of solar resources. Oman is building a giant 500 megawatt (MW) solar farm, but it’s not just any 500 MW solar behemoth.

Less than a decade ago, a 500 MW solar power plant would have been the largest in the world, and there’s close to 0% chance it would have used bifacial solar panels, but things change. N-type TOPCon (Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact) high-efficiency bifacial solar modules are the tech that has been ordered for this plant, and the modules are now being delivered. China’s Jolywood (Suzhou) Sunwatt has shipped its TOPCon bifacial solar panels to ACWA Power’s Oman Ibri II project.

Thanks to a field trip to New Mexico in 2018, we dove into bifacial solar modules more at that time. Put simply, “A bifacial solar panel is essentially a solar panel that can collect energy from the front side and the rear side (a normal monofacial panel only collects energy from one side).” Naturally, collecting more energy is a bonus. However, a bifacial solar cell or solar module also costs more than a normal one. Increasingly, though, the improved energy efficiency seems to pay off, as we’ve see a lot more projects using these in the past year than we did in 2015 and 2016 when Silfab Solar and LG Electronics were releasing their products. Last year, Lightsource BP and Array Technologies implemented a 200 MW solar project with bifacial solar modules and solar tracking technology.

Regarding the Oman project technology, “Jolywood’s bifacial components offer superior performance and more excellent energy absorption through high-efficiency rear-surface passivation,” Jolywood claims.