SHORT COMMUNICATION: Does climate change affect the design of stand‐alone PV systems?

This paper investigates the effect of using sequences of past daily solar radiation data on PV system sizing for the case of Efford (UK). For a given system configuration that never sheds load, the lowest SOC reached by the battery is found by an energy balance model, and the energy deficit calculated for a given climatic cycle. Although the average irradiation changes little during the years 1958-1994, there is a substantial increase in the storage requirement, which seems to be related with an increase in the persistence of low solar radiation values.