Time series of electricity output for large grid connected photovoltaic installations in Chile

These data sets accompany the paper "Simulation of multi-annual time series of solar photovoltaic power: is the ERA5-land reanalysis the next big step?". They include capacity factors (values 0 to 1) in hourly temporal resolution of 103 large PV installations in Chile derived from official sources as well as simulated capacity factors using PV_LIB with ERA5-land and MERRA-2 reanalysis data. The data covers the period 2014-2018 and simulations were performed assuming either a "fixed" system with orientation towards north and inclination equal to the latitude (i.e. optimal inclination) or a horizontal single axis “tracking” system with backtracking. Furthermore, accuracy indicators (Pearson’s correlation, mean bias error and root mean square error) are provided, comparing the simulated time series with capacity factors derived from official sources. Capacity factors were calculated for the 103 installations and both alternative configurations (“fixed” and “tracking”) but only a subset of 23 installations has reference data of sufficient quality to allow for a validation (for a more detailed description, see the paper). Indicators were also calculated for all installations and configurations but should be only compared for installations inside a particular configuration: there are 14 systems classified as “tracking” and 9 as “fixed”. Further details are available in the paper and the entire Python and R code is available on github at https://github.com/inwe-boku/PV_from_era5.The file "input_data.rar" includes a shape file "solares_fd0779de_0870_4194_b962_83a842d8c316.shp" containing the locations of the PV installation as well as a subdirectory "energia_abierta" where all raw time series of the installations in their original download. The MERRA-2 and ERA5-land files are not provided but the time series of the variables transformed to the units useful for the simulations for the location of each plant are provided in individual files (per variable and reanalysis source) in the file "data.rar". The file "data.rar" also includes all necessary files to run the R analysis scripts. The content of the file is described in more detail in the excel file "data_description"