A Second Tutorial Review of the Solar Power Curve: Applications in Energy Meteorology

Abstract

The fundamental scientific and engineering knowledge concerning the solar power curve, which maps solar irradiance and other auxiliary meteorological variables to photovoltaic output power, has been gathered and put forward in the preceding tutorial review. Despite the many pages of that review, it was incomplete in the sense that it did not elaborate on the applications of this very important tool of solar energy meteorology. Indeed, solar power curves are ubiquitously needed in a broad spectrum of solar forecasting and solar resource assessment tasks. Hence, this tutorial review should continue from where it left off and present examples concerning the usage of solar power curves. In a nutshell, this tutorial review, together with the preceding one, should elucidate how surface shortwave radiation data, be they ground-based, satellite-retrieved, or model-output, are bridged to various power system operations via solar power curves.