Impact of Atmospheric Composition on the Spectral Solar Irradiance and PV efficiency

EasyChair Preprint 15975

Abstract

While solar power applications are growing rapidly worldwide, the estimation of the solar energy availability, its characteristics and various factors that affect it, play a key role to estimate the power production and, therefore, to maximize PV installations’ efficiency. Various solar PV related applications are using radiative transfer model results to characterize the direct and mostly, diffuse radiation field. Especially in the case of tilted surfaces, such sophisticated models mainly use shortwave radiation measurements for their validation. This is because, the horizontal, direct normal and tilted surface spectral irradiance is difficult to be measured simultaneously. The objective of this research is to assess the impact of the variability of atmospheric composition on the spectral irradiance and, therefore, solar energy and PV production. Ground-based measurements of solar (direct, global horizontal and tilted) spectral irradiance have been recorded by a Precision Spectroradiometer (PSR, 300-1020 nm, with a step of 0.7 nm) in the framework of the experimental campaign of the ASPIRE (Atmospheric parameters affecting SPectral solar IRradiance and solar Energy) project in Athens, Greece. The gathered data contributed to the investigation of the atmospheric variables that attenuate irradiance (e.g., aerosol effects) in model results converting GHI and DNI to tilted irradiance, especially to the diffuse component. In addition, since PV modules’ spectral sensitivity differs according to the semiconductor material used (the nominal spectral PV response is given from Standard Test Conditions), we tried to investigate the impact of the above-mentioned spectral features on PV energy output and to estimate the deviation between the theoretical and real PV outputs on the yield of different PV technologies.

Keyphrases: Ground-based measurements, Spectral Irradiance, solar energy

@booklet{EasyChair:15975,
  author    = {Dimitra Kouklaki and Ioannis-Panagiotis Raptis and Stelios Kazadzis and Kostas Eleftheratos and Ilias Fountoulakis and Andreas Kazantzidis and Apostolos Kapoulas and Kyriakoula Papachristopoulou and Nikolaos Papadimitriou and Vassilis Amiridis and Christos S. Zerefos},
  title     = {Impact of Atmospheric Composition on the Spectral Solar Irradiance and PV efficiency},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 15975},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2025}}