ICT-2009-247473
Photovoltaic energy production is an important part of the future global energy market. Especially in Germany, small scale solar production is growing massively, owed to financial incentives by the governement. A crucial feature of renewable energy sources is its unreliable and partly uncontrollable behaviour. This problem is amplified by specifics of solar producers operating in close geographic vicinity: They have a very high coincidence factor meaning that their production may change rapidly and almost synchronously owed to changes in cloud coverage. This makes the stable operation of a local area power network especially vulnerable to short term changes.
To predict critical conditions, we are developing forecasting techniques for photovoltaic energy production based on precise local information and short-term weather predictions.