An Approach for the Solar Energy Assessment using Weather Medium-Range Forecasting

Abstract

This paper presents a service that allows an operational assessment of solar energy systems based on the prediction of climate variables on different time scales, daily, monthly, seasonal or annual. The service is a planning tool building upon the Copernicus Climate Change Services, together with solar models and spatial and operational data of photovoltaic facilities. The added value of this service, as opposed to other systems that can be found on the market, is that it has been developed through an effective co-design with end-users, contributing to mutually beneficial collaboration, making possible to sustain their marketability and value. The proposed service is introduced and tested for automating both spatial and operational assessment of a utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) power plant. Experimental results are presented, which show and address the performance of the entire service.