Modeling reflected irradiance in urban environments – a case study for simulation-based measurement quality control for an outdoor PV test site

The increased application of PV in urban environments goes together with a growing awareness of the need to consider the influence of partial shading and reflected irradiance on PV performance. Most of the conventional PV simulation tools do not have the capabilities to account for the possible additional PV yield due to reflected sunlight. On the other end of the spectrum are complex ray-tracing tools that can accurately model reflected irradiance, but require a large amount of input data, are computationally intensive and have limited or no PV modeling algorithms. In this work, as a step towards quantifying uncertainties due to reflected irradiance in urban settings, the potential of a modeling strategy using building energy simulation software, with intermediate complexity is investigated using a case study of an outdoor PV test site.