Renewable energy systems have gained an immense amount of popularity technologically and socially over the past decades. At the forefront of the renewable market has been photovoltaic systems of all shapes and sizes. Photovoltaic systems perform excellently in many different environments and have become a tried and true technology for utility scale and distributed scale power generation, but still suffer from inefficiencies and performance degradation from harsh environments. This is especially realized when PV modules are exposed to high ambient temperatures and high amount of incident radiation causing a large increase in cell temperature and a reduction in overall PV output. Implementing different cooling practices with PV modules is a major focus of the industry, and is the focus of this project. Designing, developing and testing a thermoelectric based cooler would allow for the overall reduction of PV module temperature while providing some power output through waste heat recovery.
