Abstract
Shortages of electricity in Colombia associated with droughts during El
Niño-Southern Oscillation warm events lead government to seek
diversification of the electricity matrix, which is mainly hydro (66%).
Additionally, clean technologies like wind and solar power are
alternatives to climate change. Potentially, solar radiation is high
year-round in Colombia due to its low latitude, but clouds are the most
critical limiting factor. In this paper, we measure and analyze the
variations in efficiency resulting from different weather variables.
Toward that end, we measure three photovoltaic systems located in three
different zones of the valley. Simultaneously, we analyzed some of the
limiting factors which influence solar radiation. For that, we consider
radiation from 3 pyranometers, air temperature and relative humidity
from meteorological sensors, water vapor density, liquid and solid water
content from a microwave radiometer, reflectances as a proxy of clouds
from GOES 16 satellite visible band 2. To identify clouds, we estimated
radiance thresholds for the GOES information in the three locations of
interest from changes in the surface radiation data. These thresholds
provide identification of the most sensible hours for radiation based on
the anomalies of the radiation under cloudiness conditions. Lastly, the
efficiencies on each location were calculated considering the power
data, as a proportion of the horizontal global radiation and the area of
each solar panel.