Management and exploitation of direct normal irradiance resources for concentrating solar collectors: Algeria as a case study

Abstract

The use of concentrating solar collectors which are used in solar thermal power plant and concentrated photovoltaic systems implies that these systems only work with the direct normal irradiance (DNI). Unfortunately, DNI ground-based measurements are rarely available at the location of interest, this lack of DNI data contrasts with the availability of global and diffuse horizontal irradiance data (GHI, DHI). Nowadays, several spatial databases that estimate DNI have been developed; however, these dat- abases present uncertainty and provide different values of DNI. In this present study, a proposed methodology for estimating the hourly, monthly mean daily, monthly and annual direct normal irradiance DNI in the presence or absence of measured global and diffuse horizontal irradi- ances. When applying the proposed method for calculation of DNI for three Algerian ground stations (Algiers, Ghar- daia, and Tamanrasset), we obtained better performances than those of the five spatial databases' data, especially for the monthly values. The methodology seems to give a very appropriate way for management and exploitation of DNI resources for the design and analysis of concentrating photovoltaic and thermal systems; and can be applicable to other worldwide locations using empirical equations with new correlation coefficients for estimating direct normal irradiance.