Reducing Variation in Solar Energy Supply Through Frequency Domain Analysis

Solar irradiation tends to vary greatly throughout the day. The difference is very large especially between the early hours of sunshine, and during the peak hours of the day. Yet, it is desirable to supply a nearly constant amount of power to loads or power grids for high reliability. Hence, we propose a technique aimed at reducing the variation in solar power generation. Solar irradiation data is considered as a time-series data and the approach involves conversion of this data to the frequency domain through Fourier analysis. A more balanced supply by a set of plants is devised by interconnecting the plants, which also requires finding the optimum number of plants to connect using the above analysis. The effectiveness of the procedure is demonstrated by applying a suitable supply prediction algorithm over the individual plants and the effective data for the plants, using real data from Nevada, Texas, and California.