Bias Correction and Statistical Downscaling of Future Solar Irradiance Projections Using the NSRDB

Jaemo Yang, Manajit Sengupta, Maggie Bailey, Douglas Nychka, Aron Habte, Soutir Bandyopadhyay, Yu Xie

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper

Abstract

Assessing renewable energy resources under future climate scenarios has been highlighted to understand potential impacts of future climate change in renewable generation on the power sector. Climate model projection has been recognized by the renewable energy community as a useful data set to analyze the impacts of future climate change on renewable resources. However, future climate projections generated from general circulation models (GCMs) contain inherent biases that need to be corrected for accurate analysis of future projections of climate variables. In addition, the coarse spatiotemporal resolution of GCMs needs to be improved for regional climate studies. In this work, we develop statistical methods to downscale future projections of global horizontal irradiance (GHI) in a computationally efficient way. Our approach builds statistical downscaling models that correct bias of climate projection of GHI and downscale the future GHI projection from daily-scale to hourly-scale. The National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) is used to calibrate the statistical models and validate the downscaled GHI projections across the contiguous United State (CONUS). Preliminary results show that the statistical approach efficiently downscales climate projections of GHI with a nBIAS of 3%, nMAE of 34 % and nRMSE of 46% calculated against NSRDB for CONUS. This study describes the implemented methodology and initial results as well as future research to create high-resolution climate data sets for solar energy applications.
Original languageAmerican English
Pages793-795
Number of pages3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event2024 IEEE 52nd Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC) - Seattle, Washington
Duration: 9 Jun 202414 Jun 2024

Conference

Conference2024 IEEE 52nd Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC)
CitySeattle, Washington
Period9/06/2414/06/24

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/CP-5D00-92716

Keywords

  • analytical models
  • climate change
  • computational modeling
  • energy resolution
  • meteorology
  • renewable energy sources
  • solar irradiance
  • solar radiation
  • spatiotemporal phenomena
  • statistical analysis
  • weather forecasting

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