Worldwide impact of aerosol's time scale on the predicted long-term concentrating solar power potential.

ABSTRACT: Concentrating solar technologies, which are fuelled by the direct normal component of solar irradiance (DNI), are among the most promising solar technologies. Currently, the state-of the-art methods for DNI evaluation use datasets of aerosol optical depth (AOD) with only coarse (typically monthly) temporal resolution. Using daily AOD data from both site-specific observations at ground stations as well as gridded model estimates, a methodology is developed to evaluate how the calculated long-term DNI resource is affected by using AOD data averaged over periods from 1 to 30 days. It is demonstrated here that the use of monthly representations of AOD leads to systematic underestimations of the predicted long-term DNI up to 10% in some areas with high solar resource, which may result in detrim

SUBMITTER: Ruiz-Arias JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4979049 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature