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25th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition / 5th World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion, 6-10 September 2010, Valencia, Spain; 5256-5262, The paper has a twofold objective. The first one is to introduce the renewable energy platform that is in the process of formulation. Driven by the EU-Africa Joint Strategy and responding to the needs of African population to increase access to sustainable energy, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission is building a renewable energy platform to increase the scientific and technical analytical capacity of the African community on support of sustainable energy planning. The second objective is to show the initial results of the analysis carried out in the framework of the platform on the selected rural electrification options that shows the basic conditions to apply renewable energy sources in the sustainable energy development in Africa.

23rd European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition, 1-5 September 2008, Valencia, Spain; 2929-2931, This paper compares three methods to predict the performance of several photovoltaic (PV) module technologies. The first two execute a least-squares fitting, but they are based on different approaches, while the third one is based on a biharmonic spline interpolation. The methods fit to a set of experimental data (either indoor or outdoor) and then estimate the maximum power (Pm) output at any given conditions of in-plane irradiance (G) and module temperature (Tm). The reduction of the set of data, while still obtaining reasonable results, has also been examined. In general terms, we conclude that the first method, an analytical approach, provides the best accuracy in terms of power prediction. Moreover, it is the least computationally demanding of the three.