A research team from Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University has investigated the techno-economic performance of different pole-mounted photovoltaic configurations with the aim of identifying the most suitable designs for off-grid applications in hot, arid environments with limited maintenance access.
These systems use solar modules attached to or integrated into poles to power off-grid equipment such as streetlights, cameras, sensors, and telecommunications devices.
“Pole-mounted solar systems have traditionally been selected based on a single metric: cost per watt. Our year-long field measurements show why engineers also need to consider maintenance access, shading, and wind loads,” corresponding author Khaled Aʼamar told pv magazine. “To our knowledge, this is the first framework for selecting off-grid, pole-mounted PV configurations grounded in a full year of experimental measurements.”
Aʼamar said the researchers developed indices to quantify the additional design requirements associated with different constraints, alongside a six-criterion framework to help engineers select the most suitable configuration for a given site.
“The next step is to take these findings from the test bench to the street,” he said, adding that Sunray Solutions, where he serves as chairman, is seeking partners for pilot deployments of pole-integrated systems.
The researchers monitored five PV configurations at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI) outdoor test facility in Doha between August 2025 and August 2026. The configurations included U-IBC and bifacial modules mounted at a 22-degree tilt or vertically, as well as an octagonal vertical PV tube. The team recorded electrical output and environmental conditions at one-minute intervals, retaining 311 days of data after screening.
Using low-irradiance data, the researchers sized PV arrays to meet a daily load of 1 kWh, assessed installation footprints, and estimated battery storage requirements based on three reference days. They used soiling measurements and geometric factors to estimate energy losses and cleaning requirements, while analytical models were used to assess shading and wind-related structural requirements.
The team calculated penalties associated with different constraints and ranked the configurations against six criteria: installed capacity, footprint, storage, maintenance, shading resilience, and structural compactness. Sensitivity analyses examined the effects of criterion weighting, temperature, and costs.
“Geometry makes a substantial difference to the impact of dust,” Aʼamar said. “When modules are never cleaned, tilted panels need 16.04% more PV capacity to compensate, compared with just 0.70% for the vertical photovoltaic tube – a 23-fold difference.”
He added that shading posed an even greater constraint under Doha’s conditions.
“Our model predicts that all the planar configurations stop producing above 67% shading, while the tube keeps operating,” he said.
“There is no single winner, though,” Aʼamar said. “Tilted bifacial modules need the least installed capacity when the site has no constraints. But when maintenance access, shading, space, or structural limits become an issue, the tube has the lowest combined penalty, even though its baseline capacity requirement is about 2.7 times higher.”
The findings are presented in the study “Techno-Economic Analysis of Off-Grid Pole-Mounted Photovoltaic Configurations for Accessible and Inaccessible Sites in Arid Climates,” published in Solar Energy.
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