| Work Detail |
The European Commissions new tool calculates how much electricity a photovoltaic system could produce at any given location, how output varies throughout the year, and how much a battery would help use all the electricity produced.
The European Commission has launched version 5.3 of the PVGIS (Photovoltaic Geographical Information System) tool. The online tool is free of charge and available in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. No registration is required to view the results.
PVGIS provides information on solar radiation and the performance of photovoltaic systems anywhere in the world except the North and South Poles.
Specifically, it can calculate how much electricity PV could produce at a given location, how output varies throughout the year, and how much a battery helps utilize all the electricity produced by the installation.
As for solar radiation, its calculation takes into account time series of hourly, daily or monthly values ??of solar radiation and photovoltaic performance.
For meteorological calculations, it analyses a set of hourly data of nine climatic variables throughout a “typical” year, formatted for building energy calculation tools.
You can choose between a grid-connected or grid-offline system, photovoltaic technology, orientation, inclination. It also allows calculations on fixed systems or with trackers (one or two axes). In the latter case, the characteristic angles of the different solar tracking systems can be defined by the user or calculated by PVGIS in order to maximize annual energy production. For both fixed and tracker systems, the calculation takes into account solar radiation, temperature, wind speed and the type of photovoltaic module.
To calculate the performance of PV systems that are not connected to the grid, but rely on battery storage to supply power when the sun is not shining, it uses information on the daily variation in the systems electricity consumption to simulate the flow of energy to users and to and from the battery. The calculations are performed using the full temporal coverage of the chosen solar radiation database.
It can calculate data up to 25 km offshore, covering coastal waters and, according to the Commission, “smaller geographical areas around the world are now comprehensively covered, increasing PVGIS’s capabilities to produce global maps.”
Finally, it is able to accurately calculate data on snow-covered surfaces. |
