Data-Driven Planet #27: Boosting Wind With Supercomputers
Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are performing supercomputer simulations in order to improve wind predictions. The utility operators can soon start trusting the forecasts so that on windy days they could rely completely on wind power and turn off the coal plants.
“To make wind predictions that are sufficiently accurate for utility operators, Olson said they need to model physical parameters at a 750-m resolution — about one-sixth the size of Central Park, or an average wind farm.”
— Joe Olson, the Lead Model Developer of NOAA
In this week’s Data-Driven Planet:
Predicting wind accurately becomes more necessary as the share of the wind in the total energy mix continues growing. To give utility operators better forecasts that would help to make the cost of wind energy a little cheaper, NOAA is developing numerical weather prediction models that can provide more accurate wind forecasts in regions with complex terrain.
Freely available Sentinel remote sensing data is useful for agriculture, energy, environmental, insurance, and others industries. Short revisit times, multi-spectral coverage and high resolution make it an unique data product. There is a growing number of sources and tools to work with Sentinel data and this curated list is a nice place to get started.
What are the 5 predictions on what the new year will bring for renewable energy in 2017? Solar growth, net metering, utility-scale growth, increasing corporate demand, and a boost from policies. Beyond mainstream renewable energy sources, it’s worth to keep an eye on the promising new energy sources.
Coal is receding because of renewable energy. As a milestone in Europe, for the first time in history the UK generated more energy from wind than from burning coal. On a related note, this map shows real-time CO2 emissions of the European electricity generation. As you can see, Poland’s coal and Estonia’s oil shale make them distinctively stand out among the others.
What’s the value of an accurate weather forecast? Spire, the weather satellite company, says businesses will lose globally due to bad weather a staggering $2.8 trillion in 2017. Many organizations around the world are working on solving this problem, and a group of researchers are planning to create reference datasets to improve weather satellite data quality.
As a part of our continued commitment to deliver operational intelligence to our customers, each week we publish a carefully curated list of news we consider to be important. Focused on the intersection of geospatial data, earth science, energy, and IoT, the Data-Driven Planet newsletter includes the week’s most notable developments in the market. Subscribe to this Medium Channel to be notified of the next update.
