Solar radiation and photovoltaic electricity potential
Solar energy is one of the environmentally sustainable resources for producing electricity using photovoltaic (PV) systems.
The European Commision has developed a solar radiation database from climatologic data homogenized for Europe and available in the European Solar Radiation Atlas, using the r.sun model and the interpolation techniques s.vol.rst and s.surf.rst.
The model algorithm estimates beam, diffuse and reflected components of the clear-sky and real-sky global irradiance/irradiation on horizontal or inclined surfaces. The total daily irradiation [Wh.m-2] is computed by the integration of the irradiance values [W.m-2] calculated at regular time intervals over the day. For each time step during the day the computation accounts for sky obstruction (shadowing) by local terrain features (hills or mountains), calculated from the digital elevation model
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