  Modelling long time series of photovoltaic electricity generation in high
temporal resolution using reanalysis data has become a commonly used
alternative to assess the viability of systems with high shares of renewables,
their risks of failure and probability of extreme events. While there is a
considerable amount of literature evaluating the accuracy of the original solar
radiation and temperature variables in these data sets, the validation of the
calculated output of photovoltaic installations is scarce and usually limited
to locations in Europe. This work combines the new ERA5-land reanalysis data
set and PV_LIB to generate hourly time series of photovoltaic electricity
generation for several years and validates the results using individual data of
57 large photovoltaic plants located in Chile. Results are also compared with
PV output for these locations calculated using renewables.ninja, a platform
relying on MERRA-2, a global reanalysis with five times lower spatial
resolution. Accuracy and bias indicators are satisfactory for plants that do
not present severe anomalies in their generation profiles and where basic plant
characteristics such as size and orientation match our model assumptions.
However, the improvements in indicators over results obtained with
renewables.ninja from MERRA-2 are minor. The validation process serves not only
to confirm the suitability of the proposed workflow to model the output of
individual photovoltaic plants, but also to list and discuss data quality and
availability issues. Efforts towards availability and standardization of data
of individual installations are necessary to improve the basis for further
developments.
