A normalized variability index of daily solar radiation

Abstract

The Variability Index (VI) is widely used to quantify the intra-day solar radiation variability. It compares the length of the global horizontal irradiance (GHI) or direct normal irradiance (DNI) profiles with the length of the corresponding clear sky GHI/DNI profiles. The VI is not a normalized index, it shows dependency on the day of the year, geographic location and time resolution. Thus, the quantification of the intra-day variability of the solar resource between different locations or different seasons could be mistaken. In this work, we propose a novel definition of the VI in order to normalize it (VI’). Moreover, we suggest a methodology to assess the dependencies of the intra-day solar resource variability quantifiers with the day of the year, geographic location and time resolution. We evaluate and compare the performance of both indexes in two different locations along two synthetic years and a measured annual dataset in different time resolutions.