Quality of performance assessment of PV plants based on irradiance maps

For the estimation of the expected annual energy yield and the month-by-month check of a PV system’s performance, methods based on irradiance maps published by weather services, both general or dedicated to solar energy application, are in use. Examples for this type of information for Germany are the annual and monthly radiation maps as published by the German Weather Service DWD, the data bank of hourly irradiance data with continuous spatial coverage prepared by the University of Oldenburg, and the radiation data products of the Climate Monitoring Satellite Application Facility CMSAF assembled by a consortium of European Weather Services.
To assess the validity of these data sets for the aforementioned tasks, a case study for a region covering the German federal state of Saxony is performed using data for the year 2005. For this region a set of ground-measured irradiance data from meteorological stations operated by the German Weather Service DWD is available. The comparison of hourly information on radiation sums is on one hand performed by the monthly analysis of the bias and the RMS-error for the Oldenburg data bank of hourly values versus the ground station data. For an additional inter-comparison of the different data sources, the annual maps presenting the estimates of the irradiance sums for 2005 are analyzed, giving information of data accuracy with respect to the spatial structure of the irradiance field.
The assessment of the end use accuracy of the irradiance data is made by investigating a set of monthly energy yield data of grid-connected PV systems. This is done via the estimation of the energy yield using a PV system simulation applying the irradiance data generated at the University of Oldenburg.