In 50 Shades of Orange: Germany’s Photovoltaic Power Generation Landscape

Spatiotemporally resolved data on photovoltaic (PV) power generation are very helpful to analyze the multiple impacts of this variable renewable energy on regional and local scales. In the absence of such disaggregated data for Germany, numerical simulations are needed to obtain the electricity production from PV systems for a time period and region under study. This manuscript presents how a physical simulation model, which uses open access weather and plant data as input vectors, can be created. The developed PV model is then applied to an ensemble of approximately 1.95 million PV systems, consisting of ground-mounted and rooftop installations, in order to compute their electricity production in Germany for the year 2020. The resulting spatially aggregated time series closely matches the measured PV feed-in pattern of Germany throughout the simulated year. Such disaggregated data can be applied to investigate the German PV power generation landscape at various spatiotemporal levels, as each PV system is taken into account with its technical data and the weather conditions at its geo-location. Furthermore, the German PV power generation landscape is presented as detailed maps based on these simulation results, which can also be useful for many other scientific fields such as energy system modeling.