A Review of Various Techniques for Solar Radiation Estimation

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century is for the exploration of optimum utilization of Renewable Energy due to its great advantages over Non-renewable Energy. Among all other renewable energy like wind, tidal, etc. solar energy is preferred due to its abundancy and potential. Efficient utilization of Solar Energy is a great area of interest of the researchers. Optimum utilization of solar energy is directly related with amount of solar radiation received. Radiation data recorded by the measuring devices available at meteorological stations are the accurate one. But, due to its high cost and unavailability of meteorological stations everywhere, solar radiation is estimated based on geographical and meteorological parameters by the solar radiation estimation models. Modelling is executed mathematically or soft computing based techniques. Some of them are reviewed in this paper. They are compared and their results are analysed. Among Empirical Models, ANN Models, Fuzzy Models, ANN based Models are found to be most suitable one, due to better correlation and lesser statistical error rate like MBE or RMSE. Although, computational requirements are increased in ANN Models. Also, challenges behind solar radiation modelling and statistical evaluation methodologies are addressed.