A Concise Overview on Solar Resource Assessment and Forecasting

Abstract

China’s recently announced directive on tackling climate change, namely, to reach carbon peak by 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, has led to an unprecedented nationwide response among the academia and industry. Under such a directive, a rapid increase in the grid penetration rate of solar in the near future can be fully anticipated. Although solar radiation is an atmospheric process, its utilization, as to produce electricity, has hitherto been handled by engineers. In that, it is thought important to bridge the two fields, atmospheric sciences and solar engineering, for the common good of carbon neutrality. In this überreview, all major aspects pertaining to solar resource assessment and forecasting are discussed in brief. Given the size of the topic at hand, instead of presenting technical details, which would be overly lengthy and repetitive, the overarching goal of this review is to comprehensively compile a catalog of some recent, and some not so recent, review papers, so that the interested readers can explore the details on their own.