Statistical modeling of energy production by photovoltaic farms

This paper introduces several alternative statistical approaches to modeling and prediction of electric energy generated by photovoltaic farms. The statistical models use outputs of a numerical weather prediction model as their inputs. Presented statistical models allow for easy-to-compute predictions, both in temporal sense and for out-of-sample individual farms. Model performance is illustrated on a sample of real photovoltaic farms located in the Czech Republic.

I. Introduction

In the Czech Republic, as well as in other countries in Europe and around the world, there has been a considerable boom of photovoltaic energy generation. In the Czech Republic, as a response to government-sponsored incentives, the increase in installed capacity of photovoltaic generation has been extremely sharp. The generation capacity grew from 55 MWp in 2008 to 463 MWp in 2009. It is expected, that installed power in the Czech Republic will be between 1000–2000 MWp by the end of 2010 [1].