Recent Developments in Estimation of Solar Radiation

Abstract

Solar radiation estimation is one of the integral part of solar power system design. Optimal harvesting of solar radiation is possible if it is estimated well in advance. Radiation measuring devices are found installed at Meteorological Stations. But these stations may not be our region of interest. Due to this limitation, solar radiation estimation models are developed. These models normally accept meteorological parameters like wind speed, ambient temperature, relative humidity, day temperature etc. and geographical entities like latitude, longitude and altitude as input and provide Global Solar Radiation(GSR). These models are statistically tested based on error calculation like MBE, MAE, Root RMSE etc. In this paper brief review of different solar radiation estimation models with methodology used is made. Soft computing based models are reviewed here. From this paper reader will come to know about various techniques used in solar radiation estimation. Study reveals that ANN based models have good performance in comparison to others.