Solar Energy Resource at Preset Point on the Earth's Surface

When solving problems related to providing power supply to the consumer by means of photovoltaic installations, the issue of availability of data on the solar radiation intensity is initial and very important. The amount of actinometrical information should be sufficient, relevant, accessible from the point of view of designing, optimizing and justifying the parameters of photovoltaic installations and consumer requirements at preset point on the Earth's surface. However, the variability of the solar energy introduces a high uncertainty in predicting the operation of a photovoltaic system. The method has been designed for estimating the resource of solar energy at preset point on the Earth's surface based on the combination of the calculation method, satellite measurements with verification using ground-based metrological data, followed by identification of the characteristics of the energy flow by separation of variables and approximation methods, which makes it possible to determine in full the information necessary for solar engineering calculations: hourly, daily, monthly and annual sums of all components of solar radiation coming on the receiving surface arbitrarily oriented in space. The relative deviation between the data from various sources of actinometrical information and the data obtained by the proposed method at the studied geographical point is within 1–6% for the summer period, 5–7% for the spring period, 1–2% for the autumn period, 6–12% for the winter period, and 3% for the annual values, which indicates the high accuracy of the proposed method.