Recent advancements in the numerical simulation of surface irradiance for solar energy applications

This paper briefly reviews the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's recent efforts to develop all-sky solar irradiance models for solar energy applications. The Fast All-sky Radiation Model for Solar applications (FARMS) uses the simulation of clear-sky transmittance and reflectance and a parameterization of cloud transmittance and reflectance to rapidly compute broadband irradiances on horizontal surfaces. The accuracy of FARMS is comparable to that of two-stream approximation, but it is approximately 1,000 times faster. A FARMS for Narrowband Irradiance over Tilted surfaces (FARMS-NIT) has been developed to compute spectral irradiances on photovoltaic (PV) panels in 2,002 wavelength bands. FARMS-NIT has been extended to bifacial PV panels by accounting for solar radiation reaching the backside of a PV panel.