Photovoltaic power generation hourly modelling

With the increase of solar power production, the modelling of this generation has to be considered in distribution network planning and operation. The purpose of this paper is to present a model that can estimate the hourly energy produced by a solar module in different sunshine conditions. The output power of a solar module is mainly dependent on solar radiation, temperature of the solar cell, and the technical properties of the module. The most complex of these is the solar radiation and how it changes in real sky and weather conditions. To model the solar radiation in southern Finland area, measured hourly long term radiation and sunshine data was obtained from the Finnish Meteorological Institution. With these data a regression model for solar irradiation was constructed and used for the power generation model. The solar irradiation model manages to estimate the irradiation quite well especially for a horizontal surface.