Performance estimation of photovoltaic energy production

Casula, Laura;D’Amico, Guglielmo;Masala, Giovanni

;Petroni, Filippo

2020-01-01

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Abstract

This article deals with the production of energy through photovoltaic (PV) panels. The efficiency and quantity of energy produced by a PV panel depend on both deterministic factors, mainly related to the technical characteristics of the panels, and stochastic factors, essentially the amount of incident solar radiation and some climatic variables that modify the efficiency of solar panels such as temperature and wind speed. The main objective of this work is to estimate the energy production of a PV system with fixed technical characteristics through the modeling of the stochastic factors listed above. Besides, we estimate the economic profitability of the plant, net of taxation or subsidiary payment policies, considered taking into account the hourly spot price curve of electricity and its correlation with solar radiation, via vector autoregressive models. Our investigation ends with a Monte Carlo simulation of the models introduced. We also propose the pricing of some quanto options that allow hedging both the price risk and the volumetric risk.