Advanced Solar Resource Modeling and Analysis (Final Technical Report)
- Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
The SunShot Initiative coordinates research, development, demonstration, and deployment activities aimed at dramatically reducing the total installed cost of solar power. The SunShot Initiative focuses on removing critical technical and non-technical barriers to installing and integrating solar energy into the electricity grid. Uncertainty in projected power and energy production from solar power systems contributes to these barriers by increasing financial risks to photovoltaic (PV) deployment and by exacerbating the technical challenges to integration of solar power on the electricity grid. The dominant contribution to uncertainty in projected power and energy from solar power systems arises from uncertainty in the estimated solar resource. Most often, the solar resource is estimated from satellite measurements which may be supplemented by on-site ground measurements. To project system power and energy, irradiance must be estimated over the system’s footprint, separated into direct and diffuse components, and translated into the array’s plane. Uncertainty in the estimated irradiance thus arises from uncertainty in the models that: translate satellite measurements to estimated irradiance; portray the spatial and temporal variation in irradiance over a power plant’s footprint, or over a fleet of solar power systems; and separate global horizontal irradiance into its beam and diffuse components.
- Research Organization:
- Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
- Contributing Organization:
- Baylor University
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC04-94AL85000
- OSTI ID:
- 1232609
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Systems Integration Fact Sheet
A Refined Method to Translate Solar Data Quality Assessment Flags to Estimated Measurement Uncertainty