A geostatistical approach for identifying the shadowing conditions affecting a PV plant

Geostatistical approaches are commonly used in many disciplines, but they can be also useful also in identifying the operating conditions of a photovoltaic field, especially when solar irradiance hits differently its modules or when partial shading occurs. Despite some applications has been presented in literature, different aspects related to the accuracy of the operating condition identification process have been not yet analyzed into detail. This paper is aimed at discussing the dependence of the process with respect to the parameters of the geostatistical method. Moreover, a method for the prediction of the shadow motion is proposed and verified in simulation. The interest of this work relies in opening the on-line application of the proposed methods, e.g. in the dynamic photovoltaic systems reconfiguration.