Development of a stochastic hourly solar irradiation model

Abstract

We have developed a new solar irradiation model and implemented it in the SunIrradiance photovoltaic cell/module simulator. This model uses stochastic methods to generate the hourly distribution of solar irradiation on a horizontal or inclined surface from monthly irradiation values on the horizontal surface of a selected location and was verified with the measured irradiance data in Ljubljana, located in Central Europe. The new model shows better simulation results with regard to the share of the diffuse irradiation in the region than the other models. The simulation results show that the new solar irradiation model is excellent for photovoltaic system simulations of single junction PV technologies. © 2014 Kristijan Brecl and Marko Topič.