Solar Forecasting I

Solar Forecasting I, the first of two solar forecasting sessions in the Resource Application and Integration track, took place today here at SOLAR 2013. Forecasting for both solar and wind is a very crucial contributor to solar PV systems, and newly advanced technologies are being tested and used today.

John “Skip” Dise, product manager at Clean Power Research started off with his presentation of behind the meter PV-fleet forecasting. He took us through the use of Solar Anywhere  software, which includes irradiance data and historical satellite-derived time-series data from 1998 through the latest hour. John described the PV specifications and Fleetview simulation methods as applied to San Francisco and other various Californian cities.

Jeff Friedman of the Hawaiian Electric Company next told us of his experience with the use of a Solar and Wind Integrated Forecast (SWIFT) tool in the Hawaiian Islands. Hawaii has been very aggressive in the advancement of renewable energy tools, partly due to the extremely high fuel costs here. The variability of sun and wind is obviously a challenge to overcome when using them for energy sources, and Hawaii also presents some unique environmental challenges such as lava flows. Jeff evaluates and presents the obstacles of using a SWIFT tool on the islands.

Israel Lopez-Coto, a student at the University of California, San Diego, next presented a project of his. This included a comparison between several parametrization schemes in WRF for solar forecasting in coastal zones. He took us through the details of the project in depth and presented the conclusions, including the fact that the most important parametrization was the radiation scheme in all cases.

Finally, Jan Kleissl, also from UCSD, presented on recent advances in solar variability modeling and solar forecasting at UC San Diego. This included the Wavelet Variability Mode (WVM) and the UCSD prototype of advanced sky imager hardware development. Overall, this forum was quite technical for someone with limited knowledge of solar forecasting, but extremely informative nonetheless. All of the information presented today is extremely important for the successful advancement of solar systems along coastlines, and all over the US.