Observational daily and regional photovoltaic solar energy production for the Netherlands

TL;DR

This paper develops a methodology combining online solar yield data and meteorological irradiance models to accurately estimate photovoltaic energy production in the Netherlands at regional and national levels, revealing previous underestimations.

Contribution

It introduces a new estimation approach that integrates observed and modeled data to improve regional and national solar energy yield calculations.

Findings

Annual yields range from 877-946 kWh/kWp in 2016 and 838-899 kWh/kWp in 2017.

Previous estimates underestimated or overestimated yields for 2016 and 2017.

Method enables more accurate regional solar energy assessments.

Abstract

This paper presents a classical estimation problem for calculating the energy generated by photovoltaic solar energy systems in the Netherlands, on a daily, annual and regional basis. We identify two data sources to construct our methodology: pvoutput, an online portal with solar energy yield measurements, and modelled irradiance data, from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Combining these, we obtain probability functions of observing energy yields, given the irradiance, which we then apply to our PV systems database, allowing us to calculate daily and annual solar energy yields. We examine the variation in our daily and annual estimates as a result of taking different subsets of pvoutput systems with certain specifications such as orientation, tilt and inverter to PV capacity ratio. Hence we obtain specific annual energy yields in the range of 877-946 kWh/kWp and 838-899 kWh/kWp for 2016 and 2017 respectively. The current method used at Statistics Netherlands assumes this to be 875 kWh/kWp, meaning the yields were underestimated and overestimated for 2016 and 2017 respectively. Finally, we translate our national estimates into solar energy yields per municipality. This research demonstrates that an irradiance based measure of solar energy generation is necessary to obtain more accurate energy yields on both a national and regional level.