A Concise Overview on Solar Resource Assessment and Forecasting

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 thisüberreview,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.

Assessment of global solar resource development

With the increasing severity of environmental problems,many countries have set energy transition targets to promote the realization of the Paris Agreement.There has been a global consensus on utilizing solar energy resources as alternatives to conventional sources to support this energy transition.In this regard,analyzing the“location,”“quantity,”and“quality”of global solar energy resources will not only assist an individual country to efficiently utilize these resources but also promote the realization of large-scale intercontinental resource utilization and complementation.This study established the basic database,model methods,and platform tools for global solar energy assessment,Then,a global solar energy resource assessment was conducted,which included the theoretical reserves(TRs),technical installed potential capacity(TPIC),and average development cost(ADC).A comparative analysis of the assessment results for all continents was also performed.After that,based on big data analysis and geographic information system(GIS)calculations,the distribution characteristics of the global solar power TPIC were calculated with the two core indicators,namely the capacity factor and ADC.Furthermore,a data-driven quantitative evaluation of the refined development potential of solar energy resources was performed.Finally,the reasonableness and coincidence analysis of the resource assessment results were verified using data from global and specifically Chinese photovoltaic(PV)bases.

On the Development of Spatial/Temporal Solar Radiation Maps:A Minas Gerais(Brazilian)Case Study

Appropriate information on solar resources is very important for a variety of technological areas, such as agriculture, meteorology, forestry engineering, and water resources, particularly for an innovative technology such as solar energy. In the market entry process of an innovative technology such as solar energy, the increased and sustained deployment of this energy technology strongly depends on the economy and reliability of the solar systems installed. The economy and reliability of a system are the consequences of a well-prepared project, resulting from an accurate knowledge of the solar resource available. Therefore, knowing the potential of the solar resource accurately is not only a need but also an imperative for the larger diffusion and use of the solar energy. The existing sources of the information on radiation in MG are quite varied, both at the institutional level and in different types of publications. The publications containing this information are project reports, internal reports of institutions, and several magazines. Thus, the quality of the data varies considerably, the information presents spatial and temporal discontinuity;moreover, the instruments and the measurement units are not standardised. The general objective of this paper is to recover, to qualify, to standardize, and to make available the best information from the current existing solar resource in MG, Brazil, either in the form of isoline charts of solar radiation or a numerical database. In this paper, the procedure to elaborate the maps of daily solar radiation and insolation, along with the monthly and annual averages, is described. We present one map with the localisation of the recording stations in addition to one annual and 12 monthly contour maps. The map of the daily global solar irradiation and the annual average determined in this project show that solar radiation on the state of Minas Gerais ranges from 4.5 to 6.5 kWh/m2. The maximum values occur in the northern region of Minas Gerais, and the minimum values occur in the southeast region, where there are areas of higher altitude (Mantiqueira and Serra do Caparaó) and the rainfall is more intense, with total annual rainfall greater than 1400 mm. The North and Northeast Regions of MG, where the largest annual irradiation of 6.5 kWh/m2 occurs, are characterised by a semiarid climate with annual rainfall between 600 - 800 mm and altitudes between 400 - 600 m. The maritime tropical air mass that acts between Brazil and Africa is the main climatic factor that inhibits cloud formation and, consequently, the rainfall in this region. Finally, the map of annual insolation reveals a consistent correlation between the daily rainfall and the solar radiation annual average.