EXPANDING EXISTING SOLAR IRRADIANCE MONITORING NETWORK USING

ENTROPY
ABSTRACT
Many existing solar irradiance monitoring networks were built particularly for resource
assessment purposes; they are often spatially sparse. In order for the networks to handle other
increasingly important tasks, such as irradiance forecasting for grid integration, their spatial
sparsity must be addressed by adding in new monitoring stations. Optimally expanding these
networks using historical information thus becomes an important research topic for engineers.
Variability of solar irradiance in space and time can be quantified using statistics such as entropy
and covariance. The deployment of the additional monitoring stations should, therefore, utilize
these statistics to reduce the variability. More specifically, we aim at maximizing the entropy of
thenetwork. A practical difficulty in statistical modeling of solar irradiance is that the data are
not ideal. Properties such as stationarity and isotropy are not observed in irradiance random field.
We, therefore, focus on hypothesis testing and transformation of theirradiance data, so that the
design procedure is statistically justified.We propose the redesign framework in a solar
engineering context, using data from 24 irradiance monitoring stations on a tropical island. In the
case study, we demonstrate how to find three optimal stations from a pool of 100 potential future
monitoring sites.