Effect of environmental factors on the photovoltaic module performance: A short review

In recent years, photovoltaic (PV) technologies have grown significantly as an alternative source to
generate electricity via solar energy. Albeit PV technologies have grown widely, one of the major problems experienced by the PV systems during its service life is the significant drop in performance under field condition. One of the reasons that jeopardise the performance of PV system is the environmental factors. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to review the various type of environmental factors that affects the performance of the PV module and to highlight the factors that have most substantial effect on the PV systems. It was found that ambient temperature, solar irradiation, and deposition of dust particles on the module surface contributes to the major factors that causes significant drop in performance of the PV system. The effect of wind velocity and humidity might have the least impact on the PV module performance.