Investigating the variability of the Utrecht Science Park PV System

Abstract

The increasing amount of installed PV capacity in the Netherlands is increasing the burden on the electrical grid. The intermittency, or output variability of PV systems is the reason why PV systems can create this large burden on the grid if the PV capacity keeps increasing. In this paper, the output variability of the different PV systems of the Utrecht Science Park was investigated, where exclusively the variability caused by the motion of the clouds was analyzed. Performance ratios were calculated for the different PV systems to see how these systems performed at different levels of output power. The theoretical output of the different PV systems was calculated with a transposition model to be able to determine their output variability. With this output variability, the correlation between the different pairs of PV systems was calculated, after which it could be concluded that the different systems strongly correlate which each other, with significant differences being present between the different pairs of PV systems. However, the correlations were not as strong as found in previous studies about the performance of the Utrecht Science Park PV systems. This is important to take into account for further studies, which could for example go into the forecasting of the output of the different PV systems.