Photovoltaic time series for European countries and different system configurations

This repository comprises 38 years-long hourly time series representing the photovoltaic (PV) capacity factors in every European country (EU-28 plus Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Norway, and Switzerland). The term capacity factor is defined as the ratio between the delivered power and the cumulative installed capacity (DC). 3 letter codes (ISO-3166-3) are used to identify the countries. Time series include years from 1979 to 2017.

To obtain PV time series irradiance from Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) dataset has been converted into electricity generation and aggregated at country level. The PV model used for the conversion is described in the article linked below. Prior to conversion, reanalysis irradiance is bias corrected using satellite-based SARAH dataset and a globally-applicable methodology, which is also described in the article.

For every country, four different time series assuming alternative PV configurations, i.e., rooftop, optimum tilt, 2-axis tracking, and delta are provided. To obtain the PV hourly capacity factors for a country, different assumptions on the shares of the alternative configurations can be made and the weighted time series can be aggregated accordingly.

The license for the AU REatlas photovoltaic time series dataset is: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

When using this data please make sure you include the following citation:

M. Victoria and Gorm B. Andresen, Using validated reanalysis data to investigate the impact of the PV system configurations at high penetration levels in European countries, Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications (2019)  https://doi.org/10.1002/pip.3126

More information can be requested from M. Victoria (mvp@eng.au.dk) and Gorm B. Andresen (gba@eng.au.dk).

Version 2 assumes tilt angle of 60º for PV panels in delta configuration (in version 1, tilt angle in delta configuration is equal to latitude). The remaining files do not change.

Version 3 includes one additional file corresponding to country-wise time series obtained assuming 1 axis-tracker (horizontal axis oriented North-South). In addition, small corrections of the previous time series have been implemented affecting only early hours in the day.