Incorporation of statistical analysis of solar radiation in PV-sizing

This paper presents a new PV sizing methodology, based on mean expected values of the solar radiation on the PV array, the statistical fluctuations of the solar radiation, and the expected energy deficit. The fluctuations of the global hourly solar radiation are processed, and the results are used in this PV sizing. The energy independence for d days of the stand alone PV plant does not influence direcly the size of the peak power and the battery storage system, as with the conventional PV-sizing. The estimated peak power and battery storage capacity values are much lower compared to sizing results obtained by existing methodologies. This methodology has two characteristics: (1) a correction term in the conventionally estimated peak power, related to the ratio of the standard deviation of the daily solar radiation over the mean daily value. (2) the concept of the effective Load that the stand alone PV plant has to meet. The effective load is related to the standard deviation of the solar radiation fluctuations. A comparison of PV sizing results obtained by this approach and the conventional ones is shown.