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Thank you to our sponsors,ÌýProfessor Al Gasiewski and the Center for Environmental Technology (CET)!

Power companies currently rely on both fossil fuel generators and solar panels to fuel power grids, but seek to reduce overall reliance on fossil fuels. Power grids that are fueled by photovoltaic sources at high levels of integration require the prediction of both direct and diffuse solar flux. These predictions must reach an hour into the future, and offer highly accurate solar insolation estimates, with high spatial and temporal resolution.

The Solens is a compact, weather-proof, cost-efficient Internet-of-Things (IoT) device that takes images of the sky, compresses those images, and then sends them to a server. Once the images are received, they can be used to gather data on cloud coverage, which can be used to predict solar power availability. This will assist power companies in real time resource allocation, and the data from several units can be aggregated to cover a large geographical area at low cost.

Power companies will greatly benefit from being able to predict the availability of renewable power sources. Currently, power companies have backup fossil-fuel power sources available to power the entire grid, and these generators produce a significant amount of pollution. With Solens, power companies will be able to predict when their photovoltaic arrays are not able to handle the load, and can start peaking power plants only when absolutely necessary, which will minimize pollution and non-renewable resource use. As peaking power plants are typically gas turbines, and have a much higher cost per kilowatt, this is both more environmentally-friendly, and cheaper for utility companies and therefore consumers. Data collected by the Solens system can also be used to determine the best places for future photovoltaic array installations, which aids in short-term weather forecasting.

Key Benefits

• The Solens covers cloud prediction in a large area at a lower cost than current solutions.
• Power companies can use Solens to minimize fossil fuel usage in favor of solar energy.
• The spatial resolution and self-contained nature of the Solens are unmatched.
• Weather researchers and astronomers can use the cloud data for short-term, localized forecasts.