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

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

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. 

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.

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