Estimation of PV energy production based on satellite data

Estimation of Global Tilted Irradiation (GTI) is a key to performance assessment of typical solar systems since they usually employ tilted photovoltaic (PV) modules or collectors.
Numerous solar radiation databases can deliver irradiation values both on horizontal and tilted plane,
however they are validated mostly with horizontal-plane ground measurements.

In this paper we have compared time series of GTI estimates retrieved from HelioClim-3 database with results of ground-measurements of PV system located in Poland. Both data sets cover the same time period.

Our work shows that with using data from solar radiation database it is possible to make very accurate estimates of PV energy production. Estimation errors of yearly sum of GTI can be lower than 2%.