Services for Professionals in Solar Energy and Radiation

Case Studies - PV Systems

SPYCE monitors your PV system. SPYCE is an internet service that detects and identifies failures in PV systems by daily analysing their performance. Because the energy output of PV systems strongly depends on the irradiation, SPYCE needs hourly irradiance data for the locations of the PV systems. Sandra Stettler, scientist in the SPYCE team explains: "To determine the performance of a PV system, current and precise irradiance data is absolutely necessary. With the SoDa data we have reliable, ongoing irradiation data for every location in Europe. It allows SPYCE to check daily the performance of all PV systems and to give alert to the operators if necessary." The SPYCE service is a Joint Venture of the Swiss companies Enecolo AG (photovoltaic experts) and Meteotest (meteorological expertise). Date: May 2006.

PV in the developing world. Irradiance data were obtained by the European Commission's Joint Research Center (JRC) – Institute for Sustainable Development from the SoDa service. JRC selected the SoDa service because it offers long time-series of irradiance values (from 1985 onwards) over a very large geographical coverage and it enables automatic access on Internet (approx. 200 000 requests for a year, that is 4 million requests made by JRC for 20 years). JRC was thus capable of creating unique maps and derived products to assess the value and benefits of solar energy systems to produce electricity in Africa, thus helping in combating poverty and developing human welfare. These maps are provided to African countries and European authorities to help decision-makers. The potential power output from PV systems is compared to the average daily electricity consumption per capita in the countries in question. The potentials of PV appear clearly; the potential production is much larger than the present consumption. Reference: Thomas Huld, Marcel Šúri, Ewan Dunlop, Lucien Wald, Integrating the HelioClim-1 database into the PV-GIS to estimate solar electricity potential in Africa. In Proceedings of the 20th European PV Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition, Barcelona 6-10 June 2005. More on PV-GIS. Date: May 2005.