ABSTRACT
YI DING , WEIXIANG SHEN, GREGORY LEVITIN, PENG WANG, LALIT GOEL, AND QIUWEI WU
8.1 INTRODUCTION
With the ever increasing concerns on environmental issues and the depletion of fossil fuels, the photovoltaic (PV) technology has drawn great attention and remarkable investments in the past decade [1]. This is due to the fact that the PV technology shows many advantages over other renewable energy technologies in terms of modularity, expandability, maintenance and reliability. In recent years, the contribution of the PV power generation to the grid has been rapidly increasing; at the current growth rate, it is expected to reach 2% of the world electricity generation by 2020 and up to 5% by 2030 [2, 3]. During the next ten years, up to 15% of electricity in European Union will be produced by solar energy resources [4].
