Inspection of time series characteristics of irradiance governing the sizing of PV-systems for high autonomy in view of reliability of predicted security of supply

When designing solar power based clean energy supply systems in all scales – from autonomous devices
to solar home systems, village power supply and nation-wide systems - the intended degrees of autonomy and security
of supply are key figures. The identification of a reasonable system sizing – the selection of a combination of installed
PV and storage capacity - is usually done by use of time step simulations based on an at minimum annual data set of
the meteorological conditions. Due to the variability of the meteorological conditions on all time scales and the
uncertainty of available data there is consequently an uncertainty on whether the intended performance can be reached
over the live time of the systems. In this context, there is a broad discussion on the year-to-year variability of the annual
irradiance sum and thus the annual PV generation. Here, effects of the the interannual and database to database
variability of the fluctuation characteristics of the irradiance, governing the need for storage is inspected for the case of
a simple PV-storage-load system.