Evaluation of open photovoltaic and wind production time series for Norwegian locations

Abstract

We investigate the accuracy of wind and photovoltaic time series in individual systems in Norway. To study the accuracy of the available open data sets, we compare the measured production from individual photovoltaic- and wind power plants to the open time series from Renewables.ninja and EMHIRES. Additionally, we try to adjust the wind speed based on the average wind speed from Global Wind Atlas 3.0 and Norwegian water resources and energy directorate's Wind Map to try to achieve more accurate wind speed time series that take into account the local wind conditions, since they are not well represented in the large resolution of the MERRA-2 data set used by Renewables.ninja. The results for photovoltaic production time series are promising, the correlation between production obtained from Renewables.ninja and measured production is above 0.72 and maximum capacity factor difference of 2.5%. For the case of wind production, production time series show considerable deviations depending on the specific wind farm (correlation between 0.51 and 0.91 depending on the case and year). Additionally, the adjustments only improve the time series in some of the wind farms, whereas in others the results are even less accurate than the Renewables.ninja time series compared to the measured data.