A stochastic time-series model for solar irradiation

Abstract

We propose a novel stochastic time series model able to explain the stylized features of daily irradiation level data in 5 cities in Germany. The model is suitable for applications to risk management of photovoltaic power production in renewable energy markets. The suggested dynamics is a low-order autoregressive time series with seasonal level given by an atmospheric clear-sky model. Moreover, we detect a skewness property in the residuals which we explain by a winter–summer regime switch. The stochastic variance is modeled by a seasonally varying GARCH-dynamics. The winter and summer standardized residuals are proposed to be a Gaussian mixture model to capture the bimodal distributions. We estimate the model on the observed data, and perform a validation study. An application to energy markets studying the production at risk for a PV-producer is presented.