Renewable Energy Impacts

Broadening the options for alternative energy sources is essential for the global community to maintain robust, cost-effective, and reliable power grids. Public and private utility managers use our forecasting tools to efficiently and economically incorporate solar and wind power into their energy portfolios. The research strides we’ve made help predict solar and wind events. The power generated from these sources is now more reliable, which ultimately moves the world closer to renewable energy goals.

Benefits and Impacts

FastEddy®: A GPU-Accelerated Microscale Model

FastEddy®: A GPU-Accelerated Microscale Model

Saving money, power and time with this LES modeling method. A viable tool for microscale operational, educational, and more comprehensive research applications.

30-minute nowcasts of wind speed at a wind farm.

FINECAST® Nowcasting System

FINECAST® serves a wide range of meteorological applications, such as severe-weather nowcasting, wind-power prediction, and hazardous-chemical detection, to name only a few. The true value of the model is that it can produce these analyses in mere minutes, delivering timely results to decision makers, forecasters, and utility managers. 

DICast® integrates meteorological data and generates forecasts at user-defined sites and lead times. A single consensus forecast from the set of individual forecasts is generated at each user-defined forecast site based on a processing method that takes into account the recent skill of each forecast module.

Generating Automated, Timely, Accurate Forecasts Globally 10 Days Out

This technology has become a core prediction capability of several commercial weather companies including The Weather Channel, WSI, Schneider Electric, and Global Weather Corporation generating 10s of millions in business revenue for these companies.

The finished system will be made available to the solar power industry to lower costs and enable more solar power penetration. Significant savings to electrical utility rate payers is anticipated.

Improving Solar Power Forecasting

The finished system will be made available to the solar power industry to lower costs and enable more solar power penetration. Significant savings to electrical utility rate payers is anticipated.

Using advanced numerical weather prediction and statistical methods, NCAR developed a highly detailed wind energy forecasting system with Xcel Energy, enabling the utility to capture energy from turbines far more effectively and at lower cost.

Providing Wind Forecasts to Utility Companies

This wind energy forecasting system has saved Xcel Energy ratepayers approximately $10M per year since 2009. The benefits are described in a report of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Contact

Please direct questions/comments about this page to:

Branko Kosovic

Director, Weather Systems Assessment Program

email