Software correction of angular misalignments of tilted reference solar cells using clear-sky satellite open data

In-situ measurements for photovoltaic systems are very sensitive to angular misalignments. It can lead to errors in many steps of a photovoltaic (PV) project. In this paper, we propose a simple and robust method to estimate and correct a posteriori the angular misalignment of tilted reference solar cells or pyranometers. The method uses output of the clear-sky irradiance model McClear, a free Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service. We applied the method in 6-month data composed of 7 different tilted reference solar cells. We find that angular misalignment estimation found in the case study are meaningful. Finally, we showed the angular correction found improves satellite-based estimation of GTI for the 6 following months of data for clear sky days, for both RMSE and bias indicators.