Study Finds Green Roofs Make Solar Panels More Efficient
Sourced from ABC Australia
Two identical office buildings side by side in Sydney's Barangaroo provided a perfect opportunity for solar energy researchers to test a long-held hunch.
Would surrounding rooftop solar panels with green plants make them more efficient?
The answer, as it turned out, was yes.
The study was led by Peter Irga from the University of Technology Sydney and funded by the City of Sydney Council.
"For the first time we had the opportunity to compare these two buildings against each other," Dr Irga said.
On top of one of the buildings was a conventional photovoltaic solar system.
On the other, researchers surrounded the solar panels with plants and foliage.
They then compared how much energy the two solar systems produced over an eight-month period.
What they found was that the "green roof" improved performance by as much as 20 per cent at peak times and by 3.6 per cent over the length of the experiment.
Dr Irga said that solar panels actually worked better when they were not too hot.
From the Living Architecture Monitor
