Solar energy currently plays a significant role in supplying clean and renewable electric energy worldwide. Harnessing solar energy through PV plants requires problems such as site selection to be solved, for which long-term solar resource assessment and photovoltaic energy forecasting are fundamental issues. This paper proposes a fast-track methodology to address these two critical requirements when exploring a vast area to locate, in a first approximation, potential sites to build PV plants. This methodology retrieves solar radiation and temperature data from free access databases for the arbitrary division of the region of interest into land cells. Data clustering and probability techniques were then used to obtain the mean daily solar radiation per month per cell, and cells are clustered by radiation level into regions with similar solar resources, mapped monthly. Simultaneously, temperature probabilities are determined per cell and mapped. Then, PV energy is calculated, including heat losses. Finally, PV energy forecasting is accomplished by constructing the P50 and P95 estimations of the mean yearly PV energy. A case study in Mexico fully demonstrates the methodology using hourly data from 2000 to 2020 from NSRDB. The proposed methodology is validated by comparison with actual PV plant generation throughout the country.

Due to their galvanic insulation and EMI immunity properties, optical fiber links have been used in the transmitter-receiver system of an analog voltage measuring system at a high-power mid-voltage testing laboratory with a highly aggressive EMI environment. This paper introduces the application of a nonlinear compensation to limit the voltage range at the input of a voltage-controlled oscillator, which is used to produce the pulsed frequency modulation needed to transmit the analog signals over the optical fiber links. The proposed dynamic range compensation system is based on nonlinear circuits to accommodate the input range of the voltage-controlled oscillator. This approach increases the transient signal handling capabilities of the measuring system. This work demonstrates that the nonlinear compensated optical fiber approach yields a unique, electrically isolated, lightning-proof analog data transmission system, for remote measuring systems in the highly aggressive EMI environment of high-power test laboratories.

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