The photovoltaic (PV) sector is at present one of the crucial components of renewable power engineering and one of the key pillars in the global power system transformation. This article compares the annual energy yields from real-life PV installations built in Częstochowa (Poland)—three stationary PV installations and one tracker PV installation. The PV installations are located within a 2 km radius, and except for very early morning and late evening hours, there is no shading, thus identical solar exposure conditions can be assumed for all analyzed PV installations. In the case of stationary PV installations, maximum energy production may be achieved if the PV modules are southward oriented and related to their tilt angles. In the case of installations on buildings, PV modules are rarely installed in their optimal orientation. Most often, the orientation of PV modules is directly related to the location of the building and the geometric structure of the roof. A tracking system, which involves mounting PV modules on platforms that track the sun’s path, increases energy yield per module power. Limitations for tracking PV systems include the requirement for adequate, shade-free space for their construction as well as high costs of the structure itself and its maintenance. During the period analyzed (2022–2025), no PV system outages resulting from exceeding the permissible voltage in the distribution network were recorded. The energy produced by individual PV systems was also compared with the values calculated in a simulation program used to estimate annual energy yields during the system design phase.
Czaja et al. (Thu,) studied this question.