SolaRes®

SolaRes® is an operational service providing near real time and historical archives of solar resource estimate worldwide for the needs of solar plant operators and developers. It can be applied for any technology of solar power collection, photovoltaic or concentrated solar plants (CSP).

SolaRes® ingests only satellite images and simulation data, without a priori use of in-situ measurements for recalibration purposes, allowing homogeneity in time and space of all outputs.

SolaRes® provides the global horizontal (GHI), global tilted (GTI), and direct normal (DNI) irradiances, and the slant path attenuation (for tower CSPs).

SolaRes® estimates accurately the solar resource thanks to precise and detailed simulations of all physical processes of the radiative transfer performed by the state-of-the-art Monte Carlo method implemented in the SMART-G software which allows fast calculations through massive parallelization using graphic cards.

Architecture of SolaRes®

Consequently, SolaRes can account for various geometries of solar panels (inclination, shadows, …) with calculations more precise than those based on look-up tables and subsequent interpolations.

A scientific report written at the occasion of a Challenge organized by TotalEnergies between several solar resource providers shows that SolaRes® has already reached a top-level accuracy at international scale.

Figure and table below : extracts from the SolaRes® performance report.

Contact at HYGEOS: Thierry Elias