Effects of Angstrom-Prescott and Hargreaves-Samani Coefficients on Climate Forcing and Solar PV Technology Selection in West Africa

We evaluated and compared the performance of simulated Angström-Prescott (AP) and Hargreaves-Samani (HS) models on monthly and annual timescales using generalized datasets covering the entire West African region. The fitted AP model yielded more efficient parameters of a = 0.366 and b = 0.459, whereas the HS model produced a 0.216 coefficient based on an annual timescale, which is more suitable in the region compared to coefficients recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (a = 0.25 and b = 0.5) and HS (0.17), respectively. Employing the FAO and HS recommended coefficients will introduce a relative percentage error (RPE) of 18.388% and 27.19% compared to the RPEs of 0.0014% and 0.1036% obtained in this study, respectively. When considering time and resource availability in the absence of ground-measured datasets, the coefficients obtained in this study can be used for predicting global solar radiation within the region. According to the AP and HS coefficients, the polycrystalline module (p-Si) is more reliable than the monocrystalline module (m-Si) because the p-Si module has a higher tendency to withstand the high temperatures projected to affect the region due to its higher intrinsic properties based on the AP and HS coefficients assessment in the region.