The Environmental Information Services for Solar Energy Industries (ENVISOLAR) project, funded by the European Space Agency, uses information updated on a 15 minute basis by the Meteosat satellite to provided continent-wide solar energy data.
ENVISOLAR enables siting of solar plants in prime sunshine locations, giving short and long-term energy yield data that can be used to attract investors. It also lets operators check how their plants are performing by comparing power output to sunlight tallies.
“Today our audits form the basis of huge investments in the range of 50 million euros ($A80 million) for single projects,” said Meteocontrol photovoltaic auditor Gerd Heilscher.
“Besides the layout, solar radiation is the most important issue. But unfortunately only a few high-quality ground-based measurements are available at this time.”
ENVISOLAR’s top-down approach allows measurements to be given that remove the uncertainty of local factors such as local topography and geographical isolation.
Companies working in partnership have developed numerous applications for the data, using advanced algorithms to provide solar operators with data tailored to a wide range of project needs, major solar firms such as SAG Solarstrom taking advantage of the benefits ENVISOLAR offers over ground-based information.
“We need solid information for investment decisions, especially with regard to future markets like Spain,” said SAG Solarstrom CEO Uwe Ilgeman.
“The sampling and spatial resolution of ground-based data is too coarse – for example in Spain there are only 30 sites available at the moment.”
