Solar professionals use more and more satellite derived irradiation data in both utility solar parks and in small installations, as they are easy to acquire, have a very high availability, and provide a high time resolution & spatial coverage. When comparing the maintenance needed with on-site measurement devices, satellite derived irradiation data are often used as input for long-term yield assessment as well as for reference yield monitoring & business reporting.
3E and Kipp & Zonen recently published an extensive validation of more than 200 weather stations, showing that highly accurate irradiation data – in the order of ±2.5% – can be retrieved for almost any site in Europe when using state-of-the-art satellite derived irradiation data from 3E’s solar data service (https://solardata.3e.eu).
This high accuracy enables the calculation of bankable KPIs and the quick detection of production deviations for a more profitable operation.
In the study, 3E’s state-of-the-art satellite derived irradiation data is constantly compared to the data of well-maintained public weather stations leading to constant improvement of the used irradiance derivation algorithms. As the results of the analysis show, the on-site data and satellite derived data are highly complementary and should be used together to obtain redundancy and cross checks for accurate data.
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