An approach for the estimation of the aggregated photovoltaic power generated in several European countries from meteorological data

Abstract

Abstract. Classical approaches to the calculation of the photovoltaic (PV) power generated in a region from meteorological data require the knowledge of the detailed characteristics of the plants, which are most often not publicly available. An approach is proposed with the objective to obtain the best possible assessment of power generated in any region without having to collect detailed information on PV plants. The proposed approach is based on a model of PV plant coupled with a statistical distribution of the prominent characteristics of the configuration of the plant and is tested over Europe. The generated PV power is first calculated for each of the plant configurations frequently found in a given region and then aggregated taking into account the probability of occurrence of each configuration. A statistical distribution has been constructed from detailed information obtained for several thousands of PV plants representing approximately 2 % of the total number of PV plants in Germany and was then adapted to other European countries by taking into account changes in the optimal PV tilt angle as a function of the latitude and meteorological conditions. The model has been run with bias-adjusted ERA-interim data as meteorological inputs. The results have been compared to estimates of the total PV power generated in two countries: France and Germany, as provided by the corresponding transmission system operators. Relative RMSE of 4.2 and 3.8 % and relative biases of −2.4 and 0.1 % were found with three-hourly data for France and Germany. A validation against estimates of the country-wide PV-power generation provided by the ENTSO-E for 16 European countries has also been conducted. This evaluation is made difficult by the uncertainty on the installed capacity corresponding to the ENTSO-E data but it nevertheless allows demonstrating that the model output and TSO data are highly correlated in most countries. Given the simplicity of the proposed approach these results are very encouraging. The approach is particularly suited to climatic timescales, both historical and future climates, as demonstrated here.

Best Practices Handbook for the Collection and Use of Solar Resource Data for Solar Energy Applications: Third Edition

“…This statistical approach has also been employed in the Copernicus Climate Change Service to generate regional PV power for each region in Europe using the ERA5 reanalysis data set. As described by Saint-Drenan et al (2018), the parameters of the statistical regional model have been derived from the optimal tilt angle, allowing this model to be implemented anywhere in Europe without the need for a training data set. A comparison of the model output with the European Network of TSOs for Electricity data showed that this approach is well accepted.…”

A simplified seasonal forecasting strategy, applied to wind and solar power in Europe

“…As a proxy for the observed levels of wind and solar PV electricity generation, we use the national-scale energy data sets developed in ECEM (Dubus et al 2017a,b;Saint-Drenan et al 2018; see also Troccoli et al 2018). While this is based on actual, observed generation data from across Europe, it is in fact modelled.…”

Permutation test and bootstrap methods for unsupervised detection and estimation of behind‐the‐meter photovoltaic generation

“…Another work of them modifies this model into an unsupervised method that uses fuzzy arithmetic to model uncertainties and the aggregation effect [12]. Saint-Drenan et al construct the statistical distribution of PV configurations and estimate the region's PV generation by sampling PV plants from the statistical distribution [13]. These studies are essentially amplifying the power measurements of visible sites by the ratio of the region's total PV capacity to their capacity.…”