IBM develops wind and solar forecasting system

IBM has developed power and weather modelling software that could help utilities increase the reliability of renewable energy resources.

IBM says the technology combines weather prediction and analytics to forecast the availability of wind power and solar energy.

The American firm claims this will allow utilities to integrate more renewable energy into the power grid, helping to reduce carbon emissions while improving clean energy output for consumers and businesses.

The solution, named Hybrid Renewable Energy Forecasting (HyRef), uses weather modelling capabilities, advanced cloud imaging technology and sky-facing cameras to track cloud movements, while sensors on the turbines monitor wind speed, temperature and direction.

When combined with analytics technology, the data-assimilation based solution can produce local weather forecasts within a wind farm as far as one month in advance, or in 15-minute increments.

By utilising local weather forecasts, IBM claims HyRef can predict the performance of each individual wind turbine and estimate the amount of generated renewable energy.

According to IBM, this level of insight can help utilities to better manage the variable nature of wind and solar, and more accurately forecast the amount of power that can be redirected into the power grid or stored. It could also allow energy organisations to integrate other conventional sources such as coal and natural gas.

"Utilities around the world are employing a host of strategies to integrate new renewable energy resources into their operating systems in order to reach a baseline goal of a 25 percent renewable energy mix globally by 2025," said vice admiral Dennis McGinn, CEO of the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE). "The weather modelling and forecasting data generated from HyRef will significantly improve this process and in turn, put us one step closer to maximising the full potential of renewable resources."

State Grid Jibei Electricity Power Company Limited (SG-JBEPC), a subsidiary company of the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), is using HyRef to integrate renewable energy into the grid. This initiative led by SG-JBEPC is phase one of the Zhangbei 670MW demonstration project, the world's largest renewable energy initiative that combines wind and solar power, energy storage and transmission. This project contributes to China's five-year plan to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.

By using the IBM wind forecasting technology, phase one of the Zhangbei project aims to increase the integration of renewable power generation by 10 percent. This amount of additional energy can power roughly more than 14,000 homes.

Brad Gammons, general manager of IBM's global energy and utilities industry, said applying analytics and harnessing big data will allow utilities to tackle the intermittent nature of renewable energy and forecast power production from solar and wind, in a way that has never been done before.

NASA's IRIS telescope may help predict harmful solar storms

NASA's newest telescope is giving scientists their clearest pictures yet of the sun's atmosphere, and in doing so could help mitigate the potentially devastating effects an extreme solar storm could have on our power and communications networks on Earth.

Launched a month ago, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, on Thursday sent some of its first images of the sun back to Earth. The pictures should help scientists form a better understanding of the sun's weather, which is important because its influence on Earth goes well beyond providing sunlight and warmth.

(See a video version of this story on YouTube.)

An ever-changing pattern of instability on the sun's surface causes particles to be thrown outward, sometimes directly toward the Earth. These eruptions can take the form of solar flares, which cause the awe-inspiring northern lights, but can also cause the Earth's atmosphere to expand and increase the amount of drag on low-Earth-orbit satellites, such as those used for spying and GPS navigation, shortening their lifespan.

The most violent eruptions can have a much larger impact, including potentially knocking power grids offline and leaving millions without electricity. Such an eruption occurred in 1859, frying parts of the international telegraph system, which at the time was the main medium for long-distance communications.

If such an event occurred today, with electricity and Internet communications such a fundamental part of daily life, it's hard to even fully imagine the potential impact. A recent report from Lloyds of London suggested the damage from a violent eruption could leave 20 million people without power for as long as two years.

All solar weather travels through the lower solar atmosphere, and IRIS contains a powerful spectrograph that will focus on this region of the sun. Thus, scientists hope IRIS will give them a better understanding of these solar events and perhaps help them find a way to predict them.

"These beautiful images from IRIS are going to help us understand how the sun's lower atmosphere might power a host of events around the sun," Adrian Daw, mission scientist for IRIS at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "Any time you look at something in more detail than has ever been seen before, it opens up new doors to understanding. There's always that potential element of surprise."

The Earth is prone to the impact of solar weather because the particles hitting Earth from the sun are magnetized.

"When that magnetic field hits the Earth's magnetic field, we have two magnetic fields interacting and you create electrical currents," said Karel Schrijver, a senior fellow at Lockheed Martin Space Systems' advanced technology center in Palo Alto, California. Lockheed Martin built the spectrograph that lies at the heart of IRIS' observations of the sun.

The electrical currents will run through any conductor on Earth, Schrijver said, and have their greatest effect on high-voltage power lines that sit at the heart of the electric grid. The lines are like inter-city freeways for electricity, carrying power across vast distances at voltages as high as 765,000 volts. Large transformers are used to "step down" the voltage where the lines connect with regional distribution systems, and it is those transformers that are at risk. If the geomagnetic storm is large enough, the induced currents can melt the transformers.

One of the strongest major storms in recent memory occurred in March 1989. Over a period of several minutes, the Hydro Quebec power grid in eastern Canada collapsed and 6 million customers lost power. The blackout lasted almost nine hours and caused an estimated C$2 billion in economic losses -- and it could have been worse. The effects almost cascaded to regional power grids, which could have blacked out the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S.

Scientists and power grid operators worry about the prospect of something much larger, and such an event would not be without precedent.

Over the final days of August and first days of September 1859, an extreme solar storm occurred that ranks as the strongest ever recorded. It enabled amateur astronomers to make the first-ever observations of solar flares, and such giant storms are now named after one of those astronomers, Richard Carrington.

The Carrington event was so strong that aurorae, usually confined to the far north, could be seen in the night sky as far south as the Caribbean. Electricity still wasn't widely in use, but the storm shut down parts of the international telegraph network. In some places, telegraph lines were reported to be sparking, and The New York Times reported from Montreal that the Canadian Telegraph Co. took five hours to send a 400-word report because of the bad conditions.

"So completely were the wires under the influence of the Aurora Borealis, it was found utterly impossible to communicate between the telegraph stations, and the line was closed for the night," the newspaper reported on Aug. 30, 1859.

Historical records suggest Carrington-level events occur every 50 to 250 years, so Earth is now at the 150-year sweetspot for a repeat.

A recent report by Lloyd's of London predicted that another Carrington-level event is "almost inevitable in the near future" and paints a concerning picture of its potential effects. Should the U.S. be hit head on by such a storm, the report says, 20 million to 40 million people could be left without power for anything between 16 days and two years. The recovery time is so long because high-voltage transformers are such specialty items. Power utilities don't keep spare ones lying around, and they take up to 16 months to build.

The economic impact of such an event could be as high as US$2.6 trillion, the Lloyds report said.

The power industry isn't ignoring the threat. An April 2011 workshop between electricity grid operators from the U.S. and Canada resulted in the creation of a space weather alert system for the industry, and plans for coordination should a major geomagnetic storm be detected. Grid operators would have between 15 hours and two days to prepare for the storm by increasing reserves, reducing power transfers and lightening the load on susceptible equipment.

But any reduction in the availability of power could itself have an economic impact, so it's a situation to be avoided unless the likelihood of serious damage to the power grid is high.

Learning more about the sun's weather can only help scientists to provide warnings for such events.

"What we don't know is how it works, what in detail it will damage, or how likely it is that that damage will spread," Schrijver said. "And the difficulty with it is that these things happen only rarely. Once a century is when a really big solar event occurs, and our technological infrastructure has changed so much, we've never been exposed to it."

NASA launches IRIS solar mission to research space weather

NASA launched a solar telescope on Thursday that scientists hope will be able to unlock the secrets of how material gathers, moves and heats up as it travels through the Sun's lower atmosphere.

 

Scientists say that better understanding of this part of the solar atmosphere, which sits below the corona, could help explain and model phenomena like the ejection of solar material -- something that can cause damage to electronic circuits, power distribution networks and communications systems on Earth when it gets large enough.

 

The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) was launched from a Pegasus rocket that was dropped from the belly of an L-1011 TriStar aircraft flying above the Pacific Ocean, about 150 kilometers off the central coast of California.

 

The aircraft departed Vandenberg Airforce Base in southern California and dropped the rocket carrying the IRIS spacecraft at 7:27pm local time (2:36am GMT Friday). All systems appeared to be performing normally in the first few minutes after launch.

 

IRIS will focus on two parts of the lower solar atmosphere that exhibit an unusual effect: temperatures in the region are believed to be around 6,000 Kelvin near the Sun's surface and heat up to around a million Kelvin at the top of the region. That's different to our conventional experience with heat sources, where temperatures rise as the source is approached.

 

Tracking the movement of material into the upper atmosphere could help model solar eruptions and coronal mass ejections that can cause damage on Earth.

 

"What is this interface region? We don't know," said Alan Title, IRIS principal investigation at Lockheed Martin. "The instruments that looked at this region in the past have had about 20 times poorer resolution spatially and about 20 times poorer resolution spectrally. Basically, we've been looking at things that happened so fast, that data taken as slowly as previous instruments have done hasn't given us any information."

 

"But even more fundamentally, there's not been a push to look at this region because the atomic physics in this region is very, very, very complicated," he said. It's only been in the last decade that computer models scientists hope can accurately model the Sun's lower atmosphere have even become available, he said.

 

Those simulations have required NASA's Pleiades supercomputer at its Ames Research Center, in Mountain View. Pleiades, manufactured by SGI and based around Intel Xeon processors, was ranked as the 19th most powerful computer in the world on the June 2013 Top 500 list of supercomputers. When it debuted on the list in June 2011 it was the 7th most powerful computer globally.

 

As the world's climate changes and ever more sensitive electronics is deployed, study of the effects of the Sun on Earth are becoming more pressing.

 

A recent study by Lloyd's of London said between 20 million and 40 million people in the U.S. are at risk of being without power for between two weeks and two years should a violent solar storm hit. The country is particularly at risk because of its aging power grid.

 

Power outages were much on the mind of the NASA team this week. IRIS was originally meant to be launched on Wednesday evening, but was delayed by a day because of a significant power outage at Vandenberg Airforce Base earlier in the week.

 

The irony of the delay wasn't lost on Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, which will be controlling the satellite and crunching a lot of the data it produces.

 

"We believe that some, maybe a lot of power outages, actually have a lot to do with solar activity," he said. "So the better we can understand the physics going on, the better we can understand the activity, the better we can potentially predict and mitigate these problems."

 

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