Simulation of PV power plant’s output in Uruguay

Abstract

Uruguay is currently undergoing a major transition in the way that energy is generated and used. The introduction of non conventional renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, play a key role in the national energy policy. However, the development of PV systems has been scarce in comparison with wind power. The first on-grid PV power plant was installed in the North of the country in 2013 through a Japanese collaboration (JICA). This early effort shows that the technology was applicable in Uruguay and, as a consequence, contracts for 240 MW of grid-connected PV power plants have been recently authorized by the national electricity utility. In this work we simulate the output of the JICA’s PV power plant on an hourly basis to derive an estimation of the capacity factor and validate our model with the ground-truth power output of the PV plant. Then, we use the model to generate a long term estimation for the South part of the country where long-term series of ambient temperature data are available. Hourly solar irradiation series are obtained using a pre-existing satellite-based model especially adjusted to the target territory.