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Tomas Cebecauer is an expert in solar resource assessment, satellite remote sensing, geoinformatics, meteorology, and photovoltaic electricity modelling. He has received PhD in geography and geoinformatics, and is co-author of more than 70 scientific publications. He is one of authors of the decision support online system PVGIS, which notably contributed to development of photovoltaics in […]

Solar power is widely acknowledged to be the fastest-growing energy industry in the world. As technological improvements steadily progress toward the erasure of cost and efficiency barriers, two issues are coming to the forefront of public discourse on solar energy—variability and reliability. Solar-project developers and their financiers are increasingly scrutinizing the accuracy of long-term resource […]

In this last section, we present some results for the forecasting of solar irra – diance for longer forecasting horizons (>24 h) using exogenous variables. For such time horizons, models based solely on imaging (either local or remote) are not applicable, and we need to resort to NWP or fully stochastic models. NWP models solve […]

We compare 1 min averaged forecast results for DNI for 3-15 min time hori­zons. A forecast value is computed for each cloud fraction Xi and each time horizon Th, j : Ух, (t + Th, j) = DNIcs(t + Th, j) • (1 – Xi) where DNIcs (t) is the clear-sky model for DNI. FIGURE […]

Cloud-cover information needs to be extracted from sky images and incorpo­rated in the forecasting model. The image processing—designated as wind – ladder sector—comprises the following steps: Step 1. The image is converted from a spherical to a rectangular grid. Step 2. Pairs of images are used in a particle-image velocimetry (PIV) algorithm that determines the […]

When considering exogenous variables for the forecasting of solar irradiance and related phenomena, the most important one is sky condition and, in particular, cloud cover. Cloud-cover information can be obtained from satel­lite images (e. g., http://www. goes. noaa. gov/browsw. html) or from ground – based sky imagers—usually a CCD camera taking pictures of a convex […]

Models built on the historical data of 2009 and 2010 (the shaded area in Figure 15.7) are applied to the 2011 data (unshaded area) without modifications or retraining. Given that, as seen in Figure 15.1, there is a strong seasonality in power-output variability, we expect a strong seasonality in the accuracy of the predicted values […]