Solar PV on a wall

I have a South-facing fence in my back garden, and have long wondered about putting some panels on it - usually, when I see it steaming on a sunny, frosty morning.

It adds another perspective to solar, especially if there’s no (or limited) roof space. The better winter element intrigues me to supplement the poor overhead generation 

Two not exactly contradictory perspectives here: ​@Santa’s south-facing fence and ​@BPLightlog wishing to combat poor overhead generation in winter. The examples I’ve seen of vertical PV panels are mostly free-standing, double-sided and orientated N-S, so facing East and West to catch all but the midday sun. So perhaps BP needs a few (single-sided) panels on handy E-, S- and W-facing walls. And Santa needs an additional new PV-panel fence running N-S. 

You can optimise panels in a number of ways. The most popular is sloping towards the south or, alternatively, a lot more vertical. For sloping panels these tend to optimise total annual generation. For vertical or near vertical panels it optimises winter power and sacrifices summer generation. This is better if you want to use more of your solar panel output.

The first option has a reduced winter output, when you could do with more, and high summer output when you have far too much to use yourself. If you can export the excess then this one is better for returns on the system.

If you have vertical panels then you need to be careful about the spacing between rows of panels if you are going that far to ensure that shadows are not affecting the panels behind.

Peter 

Interesting stuff here - it’s nice to see this new group taking off well. 

I’ve found this University of York essay on Vertically Mounted Bifacial Photovoltaic panels which seems interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-68018-1.

There's a lot to be said for that arrangement when a conventional solution is not available. One of the less obvious advantages is that you are not working at roof level or potentially compromising roof integrity, possibly even DIY, which results in much lower installation costs which is a large proportion of the installation costs with panels being cheap. There's also the possibility of taking the panels with you if you move.

Peter 

Returning to this subject, I know someone who has a dual array (East and West) on their roof and has over winter, got panels installed on their wall (South).

They monitor the panels generation and yesterday - a decent solar day, mid March - they observed that the wall panels outperformed those on the roof.

While there can be quite a few variables to consider, this is looking worthy of further investigation