Upscaling PV power considering module orientations

Only a small share of photovoltaic (PV) systems installed in Germany are equipped with near real-time measurement devices. To estimate the generated power of a large number of unmeasured photovoltaic systems (e.g., to determine the sum of all systems in a portfolio), existing methodologies typically incorporate an upscaling step based on measured reference units. The upscaling approach presented in this paper extends this methodology by additionally taking into account the module orientation of all reference and target systems. Unknown module orientations are determined in a parameterization step using available geographic information system (GIS) based data sources. The power of the reference units is then used to estimate the power generation of all target units by applying a power projection and spatial interpolation as described in the literature. This new approach leads to improvements up to ~5% in terms of RMSErel values by offering a high spatial resolution and covering individual differences of PV systems.