White Paper: Optimizing Your Energy Yield

TrueCapture Smart Control Technology Boosts Energy Production and Financial Returns

By Allan Daly, VP of Software, and Venkata Abbaraju, Director, Technical Product Management, Nextracker, Inc.

Solar plants often have to deal with suboptimal solar tracking conditions created by terrain undulation or construction variance, as well as changing weather such as fog or hazy/diffuse light conditions where energy dips can occur.

Nextracker’s advanced TrueCapture software continuously dispatches optimal tracking algorithms to each tracker row, correcting for shading anomalies caused by uneven ground and changing weather conditions. The result – a significant boost in power production with the industry’s lowest LCOE.

In this paper, we focus on two leading areas for yield improvement:

• Differential elevations from one tracker row to the next that cause either inter-row shading and/or a backtracking algorithm that is set too loosely, reducing energy yield for most of the field.
• Diffuse light conditions that reduce energy yield when arrays follow standard astronomical tracking positions.