Impact Assessment of Short-Term Temporal Variability of Solar Power in Rajasthan Using Srra Data
Abstract
During the last decade, worldwide deployment of solar photovoltaic power plants has registered an unprecedented growth owing to – initially – politically motivated support programs and – finally – economic competitiveness. India has also witnessed an exponential growth in solar PV installation during the recent years and has set an ambitious target of 100 GW solar PV installed capacity by 2022. In Rajasthan alone, a solar power capacity of around 5.8 GW is aimed to be achieved by that time. However, short-term solar variability can be a hindrance in the process of large scale solar power deployment, as this makes operation of large solar PV plants difficult and management of power grid challenging. Here, the aim is to study the impact of short-term temporal variability of solar power in Rajasthan. Also, another motive is to observe the effect of spatial smoothing and to quantify the suppression of variability due to the same. The data sets used consist of 1-min solar irradiance data measured at ten time-synchronized solar radiation resource assessment (SRRA) sites dispersed across Rajasthan. The methodology includes calculation of clear sky index (Kt*) using Bird clear sky model, computation of site-pair correlation using the parameter ‘Change in clear sky index’ (ΔKt*), evaluation of proposed parameter ‘Percentage change in generation’ to observe Dispersion-Smoothing effect and sample calculation of parameter ‘Diversity Filter’ to estimate suppression of variability due to regional smoothing.
Keywords
Short-term temporal variability, Spatial smoothing, Pv power ramps.