The influence of different irradiation databases on the assessment of the return of capital invested in residential PV systems installed in different locations of the Brazilian territory

Rooftop residential photovoltaic (PV) generation is becoming more widespread among homeowners. A proper PV system design is crucial in order to avoid annual electricity production in excess of residential demand in countries where a net metering scheme is in place like in Brazil. It is therefore important that the information related to the average solar irradiation incident on the solar modules is accurately assessed, allowing precise estimates of photovoltaic electricity production. This work defines the criteria for the proper choice of a freely available irradiation database for the Brazilian territory and compares the results with the PVsyst-Meteonorm, a well-known modeling system. We demonstrate that, for Brazil, the Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) information provided by Openei-SWERA series is the best fit to different locations in the Brazilian territory, after introducing the corrections made by the horizontal to the plane-of-array transposition algorithms.