Estimating Photovoltaic Power Ramp Rates Using Single Point Irradiance Measurement

Generation power of photovoltaic (PV) power plants can fluctuate drastically. In this paper, it is studied how accurately different PV power modeling methods that can be executed using single point irradiance measurement estimate the PV power ramp rates (RR). 4 PV power modeling methods are compared to each other and to the measured generation power of a PV power plant. The investigation is done with 4 PV power plant sizes. The main quantities investigated are the highest observed power RRs and the distribution of the power RRs. The study is based on measured irradiance and PV power. It was found that there can be significant differences among the PV power modeling methods, and in contrast to the measured PV power when the variability of PV power was considered. Based on the results, the R2021 method performed the best, and the M2011 method performed the worst.