Does climate change affect the design of stand-alone PV systems?

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of using sequences of past daily solar radiation data on PV system sizing for the case of Efford (UK). For a given system configuration that never sheds load, the lowest SOC reached by the battery is found by an energy balance model, and the energy deficit calculated for a given climatic cycle. Although the average irradiation changes little during the years 1958-1994, there is a substantial increase in the storage requirement, which seems to be related with an increase in the persistence of low solar radiation values. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.