Climate Change Radiation Forecasting service
The service provides the total PV production per year for a defined site and parametrised fields, with comparative graphs between current production (based on historical weather data) and the future (short-term) production considering climate change scenarios. This service is available both in English and Spanish, as it is developed for the Asturias region (region at the North of Spain).
The service takes advantage of the data of the Asturias weather stations and other public weather data to calibrate and bias-adjust future data. For the future solar radiation CMIP6 data from the IPCC is considered, through a combination between SSPs (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways) and RCPs (Representative Concentration Pathways). Thus, two future scenarios are provided in the service, a “not too bad” baseline, SSP245, and a more pessimistic one, SSP585, allowing the user to choose among them. The service supports a more accurate design of solar installations in concrete locations.
The service needs to build on some user input parameters defined on a first screen, such as the site or building coordinates, the climate change future scenario, the PV panel slope, the PV panel power and the PV installation area. Then, calculation can be run and the results are provided with four main graphs with the mean daily temperature throughout the year, mean daily solar radiation throughout the year, mean daily PV production throughout the year, and mean monthly PV production throughout the year. Each graph represents both the historical data and the future data; where the historical is understood as the current year, and the future data (considering the climate change scenario selected in the parametrisation screen) is 2023-2039 (short-term to enable a more accurate energy planning), allowing the user to view a concrete year between 2023 and 2039.
The service builds on a first parametrisation by the user of site coordinates, climate change future scenario, PV panel characteristics and area to provide the total PV production per year, with comparative graphs between current production and future (short-term) production considering climate change scenarios.
In the PV panel location and definition screen, the user needs to define the site or building coordinates (or select it in the map at the right, only developed for the Spanish region of Asturias); the climate change future scenario, among SSP245 (combination of SSP2 -middle of the road- and RCP4.5, which is an intermediate scenario with a “not too bad” baseline) and SSP585 (combination of SSP5 -fossil fuelled development- with the RCP8.5, which is a very high emissions scenario, very unfavourable baseline scenario where no additional efforts are made to constrain emissions); the PV panel slope, with the option to select the optimal slope defined for 35º; the PV panel power, that can be introduced manually (e.g. from a commercial PV panel data) by adding the peak power (kWp) and the panel area, or selecting a PV technology (crystalline silicon or amorphous silicon technologies) to which the values are given by default; and finally the PV installation area, which is the area covered by the designed installation.
Then, calculation runs and shows the graphical results and numerical results in the left bar with complementary information. The mean daily temperature is a relevant data since above 25ºC the panel production decreases, while the other graphs shows data directly related with the solar radiation and PV production.
In the PV panel results screen there is also a left bar with additional data as the information parametrised in the first screen for which the results are provided, the results in figures (historical and future PV production per year, both in MWh and in kWh/m²), as well as a map to point the location.