Improving Measured Horizontal Solar Radiation Data: The Case Study-Asia Continent

Abstract

Horizontal solar radiation is the main input of all solar power applications. Solar radiation data collecting from the ground-based meteorological station seems still the most reliable compared to others such as satellite databases. In literature, there is a number of recent studies that utilize directly old measure solar radiation data without any precaution. As a consequence, the solar system can be exposed to poor technoeconomic assessment. This paper attempts to find a close agreement to enhance the old measured data within the period 1971 and 2003 to make it more applicable for further studies and applications. Therefore, NASA POWER, PVGIS 5, Meteonorm software, and old measured data are used and compared to the new measured data (as reference). All measured data are collected from the World Radiation Data Centre (WRDC) published in various articles. Six distributed locations in the Asian continent are used as a case study for this paper. Statistical methods including Global Performance Indicator (GPI) are used to investigate and compare solar data sources. It is argued that the improvement of old measured data can be obtained either by the proposed method for each country or by a proposed hybrid of all solar data sources for any location in the Asian continent.