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PVHI - Photovoltaic Heat Island Effect - Modelling with WRF

LordMicidial

New member
Dear all, eminent scientists, aspiring scientists,

I am a miserable engineer passionate about mathematical models applied to the environmental field. Actually I work for the nascent photovoltaic industry, agrivoltaics to be picky.

In the course of the permitting process for a agrivoltaic plant (20 MW) we would like to build, the public agency asked me to build a mathematical model using a list of possible models including WRF. So I am here in the dedicated forum.

I have some fortrun background and as a side business I sometimes do fire modeling with FDS, so broadly speaking I can say that I speak a language similar to yours.

Doing several searches, on the forum and online, I don't seem to have ever found a model done with WRF for a utility scale PV system.

I am even convincing myself that this would be a poor choice since WRF is a model that works on geographic scales far beyond those of a “small” plant like the one I am making (22 hectares). Moreover, I am even more convinced that given the scale it would be very difficult and perhaps computationally impossible to predict even the variations between Agrivoltaic and Photovoltaic.

What do you think? Am I an inexperienced fool? Or do I occasionally guess? This time I am really convinced that the guy employed at authorizing body has read the scientific literature in an uncomputational way.

Greetings
 
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I agree that the spatial scale of 22 hectares is way too small for WRF if that is the domain area. It might be treated as "a single point" within a larger WRF domain. Even so, I doubt that WRF can meet your requirement. This is because photovoltaic function is overly simple in WRF and I don't think it can really yield products used in photovoltaic industry.
I am not sure whether WRF-Solar can work better. Please take a look at the website here for WRF-Solar. Hope you can find some helpful information there.
 
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