Estimating Global Solar Radiation Potential for Brazil by Iranna-Bapat's Regression Models

In recent years, installing photovoltaic (PV) systems has become a worldwide trend. The prediction of solar radiation is very important to PV systems for power generation. For the large power-plant installations, the power allocations and scheduling form PV systems becomes an important issue. This paper aims at estimating the GSR for different locations in Brazil. A total of 20 locations spread across the country are used to validate Iranna-Bapat’s model. Iranna-Bapat’s model is developed to estimate the value of global solar radiation(GSR) at any location on earth surface. This model uses the most commonly measurable meteorological parameters such as ambient temperature, humidity, wind-speed, moisture for a given location. The computed values from Iranna-Bapat’s model are compared with the measured values. Iranna-Bapat’s model demonstrated acceptable results, and statistically displayed lower RMSE. Therefore this model could be a good estimator for predicting the global solar radiation at other locations for Brazil, where such data is not available.