Solar radiation in the Brazilian Northeast

摘要

The significant increase in recent years of the number of rural electrification systems (some thousands of them do exist) using photovoltaic technology installed in the Northeast of Brazil (1,500,000 km~2, approximately 42 million people) used for illumination or water pumping, calls for an improvement on the design procedures in order to reduce the burden of capital costs per unit of generated power. Such objective can be accomplished as long as a better knowledge about the solar resource is achieved, considering how much these applications depend on it.