Data-Driven Planet #29 — Why Energy Is The New Internet
This week, TechCrunch published a wake-up call to draw attention to the revolution happening in the energy industry. The economic opportunities behind the changing energy industry are so big, that at first, they’re even hard to grasp.
“It goes well beyond Tesla. There is a long list of innovators emerging. They are building nanogrids, microgrids, distributed energy resources and virtual power plants; deploying new networks and intelligence that are driving down costs and improving services.”
— Brian Lakamp, Crunch Network contributor
Why energy is the new internet. A dynamic, distributed, redundant and multi-participant energy network built around clean energy generation, storage and delivery, is creating a new kind of healthy, robust economy — just like the Internet did in the 90s. It’s the foundation for smart-city technology.
The World Bank Group launched Global Solar Atlas. The primary aim of the Global Solar Atlas is to provide quick and easy access to solar resource data. The tool is really easy to use, automatically generating a detailed report after selecting a location on the map. The report provides long term and daily averages for different types of solar irradiation (horizontal, normal, tilted), and also estimated photovoltaic power output for a system of size, angle and tilt defined by the user.
The European Copernicus Earth Observation program released a comprehensive market report. A must-read for everyone involved in the Earth Observation and geospatial data industries. The 97-page document explains the key needs and benefits of all related businesses. For example, the European data-generating satellite program is helping to generate 50% more benefits to solar energy producers than traditional forecasts. It also helps to reduce the costs of precision farming service by 70% and to obtain a 5% productivity gain for fish farmers.
How can we predict the climate when we can’t predict the weather? Climate models can be pretty accurate, whereas everyone has felt the frustration caused by flawed daily weather forecasts. The story by Fast Company explains the relationship between the weather and climate data and how, over time, predictions are becoming more precise.
Using R with GIS Software. Although R started as mainly a statistical package, its use has grown to include a number of areas and has become one of the best languages to quickly and easily visualize geospatial data. Tom Faulhaber gives an example of using R on NASA OpenNEX climate data in a Planet OS webinar, available on Youtube. The mentioned demo starts around 28 minutes into the video. R can read and handle a variety of vector and raster data, including shapefiles, NetCDF, and GDAL supported formats. The power of R is increasingly supported by the GIS software providers, who are integrating R-based visualization and analytical tools into their GIS packages.
Thanks for reading! In Planet OS we provide big data infrastructure that helps renewable energy companies improve their business results. To keep the industry engaged, each week we publish a carefully curated list of news we find 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.
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