A stochastic model for the hourly solar radiation process for application in renewable resources management

Abstract

Abstract. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the scientific community has made huge leaps to exploit renewable energy sources, with solar radiation being one of the most important. However, the variability of solar radiation has a significant impact on solar energy conversion systems, such as in photovoltaic systems, characterized by a fast and non-linear response to incident solar radiation. The performance prediction of these systems is typically based on hourly or daily data because those are usually available at these time scales. The aim of this work is to investigate the stochastic nature and time evolution of the solar radiation process for daily and hourly scale, with the ultimate goal of creating a new cyclostationary stochastic model capable of reproducing the dependence structure and the marginal distribution of hourly solar radiation via the clearness index KT.