Photovoltaic Model-Based Solar Irradiance Estimators: Performance Comparison and Application to Maximum Power Forecasting

摘要

Due to the increasing proportion of distributed photovoltaic (PV) productionin the generation mix, the knowledge of the PV generation capacity has become akey factor. In this work, we propose to compute the PV plant maximum powerstarting from the indirectly-estimated irradiance. Three estimators arecompared in terms of i) ability to compute the PV plant maximum power, ii)bandwidth and iii) robustness against measurements noise. The approaches relyon measurements of the DC voltage, current, and cell temperature and on a modelof the PV array. We show that the considered methods can accurately reconstructthe PV maximum generation even during curtailment periods, i.e. when themeasured PV power is not representative of the maximum potential of the PVarray. Performance evaluation is carried out by using a dedicated experimentalsetup on a 14.3 kWp rooftop PV installation. Results also proved that theanalyzed methods can outperform pyranometer-based estimations, with a lesscomplex sensing system. We show how the obtained PV maximum power values can beapplied to train time series-based solar maximum power forecasting techniques.This is beneficial when the measured power values, commonly used as training,are not representative of the maximum PV potential.