VRICONIAN

Owners of solar PV systems often notice anomalies in their system performances against long term trends, this often being around the time of submitting generation data as required by various initial support programmes, such as the UK's Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) scheme.

 

At such times it proves useful to check and compare relative system performance against other periods or long term averages, or against similar installation sites in another area using data sources, however, employing a direct comparison approach ignores the relative variability in weather conditions, both between different areas and different years, which inevitably leads to incorrect assumptions.

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​​​The UK Met Office produce a set of analytics which include annual, quarterly & monthly maps representing total sunshine hours compared to a number of pre-defined period averages, including the WMO 30 year global baseline period (1961-1990) which is extensively used in climate change research.

 

Information available in these anomaly maps can be used by those with both solar PV & solar thermal installations to help rebase differences in generation between systems in different locations or the same period in previous years. This can often explain reasons for observed performance anomalies. 

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More to follow .....