Smart Wind and Solar Power

Big data and artificial intelligence are producing ultra-accurate forecasts that will make it feasible
to integrate much more renewable energy into the grid.
Breakthrough
Ultra-accurate forecasting of wind and solar power.
Why It Matters
Dealing with the intermittency of renewable energy will be crucial for its expansion.
Key Players
Xcel Energy
GE Power
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Wind power is booming on the open plains of eastern Colorado. Travel seven miles north of the
town of Limon on Highway 71 and then head east on County Road 3p, a swath of dusty gravel
running alongside new power lines: within minutes youll be surrounded by towering wind
turbines in rows stretching for miles. Three large wind farms have been built in the area since
2011. A new one is going up this year.
Every few seconds, almost every one of the hundreds of turbines records the wind speed and its
own power output. Every five minutes they dispatch data to high-performance computers 100
miles away at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder. There artificial-
intelligence-based software crunches the numbers, along with data from weather satellites,
weather stations, and other wind farms in the state. The result: wind power forecasts of
unprecedented accuracy that are making it possible for Colorado to use far more renewable
energy, at lower cost, than utilities ever thought possible.

The amount of wind power has more than doubled since 2009.
The forecasts are helping power companies deal with one of the biggest challenges of wind
power: its intermittency. Using small amounts of wind power is no problem for utilities. They are
accustomed to dealing with variabilityafter all, demand for electricity changes from season to
season, even from minute to minute. However, a utility that wants to use a lot of wind power
needs backup power to protect against a sudden loss of wind. These backup plants, which
typically burn fossil fuels, are expensive and dirty. But with more accurate forecasts, utilities can
cut the amount of power that needs to be held in reserve, minimizing their role.
Before the forecasts were developed, Xcel Energy, which supplies much of Colorados power,
ran ads opposing a proposal that it use renewable sources for a modest 10 percent of its power.
It mailed flyers to its customers claiming that such a mandate would increase electricity costs by
as much as $1.5 billion over 20 years.
But thanks in large part to the improved forecasts, Xcel, one of the countrys largest utilities, has
made an about-face.
It has installed more wind power than any other U.S. utility and supports a mandate for utilities to
get 30 percent of their energy from renewable sources, saying it can easily handle much more
than that.

Solar power generation lags wind power production by about a decade.
An early version of NCARs forecasting system was released in 2009, but last year was a
breakthrough yearaccuracy improved significantly, and the forecasts saved Xcel nearly as
much money as they had in the three previous years combined. This year NCAR is testing a
similar forecasting system for solar power.
Mining these detailed forecasts to develop a more flexible and efficient electricity system could
make it much cheaper to hit ambitious international goals for reducing carbon emissions, says
Bryan Hannegan, director of a $135 million facility at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
(NREL) in Golden, Colorado, that uses supercomputer simulations to develop ways to scale up
renewable power. Weve got a line of sight to where we want to go in the long term with our
energy and environment goals, he says. Thats not something weve been able to say before.
Chasing the Wind
No one is more aware of the challenges of integrating wind power into the grid than Dayton
Jones, a power plant dispatcher for Xcel Energy. From his perch on the 10th floor of the Xcel
building in downtown Denver, hes responsible for keeping the lights on in Colorado. Doing so
requires matching power production to electricity demand by turning power plants on and off and
controlling their output. Generating too much or too little power can damage electrical appliances
or even plunge the grid into a blackout. Wind power, with its sharp fluctuations, makes his job
harder.
Running backup fossil-fuel plants means throwing carbon up into the sky: It costs money, and
its bad for the environment.
A few years ago, dispatchers like Jones couldnt trust forecasts of how much wind power would
be available to the grid at a given time. Those forecasts were typically off by 20 percent, and
sometimes wind power completely failed to materialize when predicted. The solution was to
have fossil-fuel plants idling, ready to replace all of that wind power in a few minutes. This
approach is expensive, and the more the system is intended to rely on wind power, the more
expensive it gets. Whats more, running the backup fossil-fuel plants means youre throwing
carbon up into the sky, says William Mahoney, deputy director of the Research Applications
Laboratory at NCAR. It costs money, and its bad for the environment.

Actual power output (green line) is overlaid on a three-day wind power forecast (red line). The
larger the yellow shaded area, the more uncertain the forecast.
NCARs forecasts give Jones enough confidence in wind power to shut down many of the idling
backup plants. The number varies depending on the certainty of the forecast. If the weather is
cold and wet and theres a chance ice could form on wind turbines and slow them down or stop
them from spinning, he might need enough fossil-fuel backup to completely replace his wind
power.
But on nice days with steady, abundant wind, he might shut down all his fast-response backup
plants, even those normally reserved for responding to changes in demand. Under such
circumstances, Jones can use the wind farms themselves to ensure that power supply matches
demand: the output of a wind turbine can be changed almost instantly by angling the blades so
they capture more or less wind. Computers at Xcels building in Denver tell wind farms how
much power to produce, and automated controls cordinate hundreds of turbines, changing
output minute by minute if needed.
Xcels original forecasts used data from just one or two weather stations per wind farm. Now
NCAR collects information from nearly every wind turbine. The data feeds into a high-resolution
weather model and is combined with the output from five additional wind forecasts. Using
historical data, NCARs software learns which forecasts are best for each wind farm and assigns
different weights to each accordingly. The resulting ber-forecast is more accurate than any of
the original ones. Then, using data about how much power each turbine in the field will generate
in response to different wind speeds, NCAR tells Xcel how much power to expect, in 15-minute
increments, for up to seven days.
Forecasting solar power is next for NCAR and Xcel, but that can be even trickier than wind. For
one thing, Xcel doesnt get information about how much power private rooftop solar panels are
generating, so it doesnt know how much of that power it could lose when clouds roll in. NCARs
new solar forecasts will use data from satellites, sky imagers, pollution monitors, and publicly
owned solar panels to infer how much solar power is being generated and then predict how that
amount will change.
Virtual Energy
How might extremely accurate wind and solar forecasts help us use enough renewable energy
to reach climate goals of significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions? Researchers at
NRELs new Energy Systems Integration Facility start by looking at how well wind and solar
power can offset each other. To what extent, for example, can wind blowing at night make up for
the lack of sunshine? But they are also looking at how to couple forecasts with smart
dishwashers, water heaters, solar-panel inverters, water treatment plants, and electric-car
chargers, not only to accommodate shifts in the wind but to ride out inevitable windless periods
and weeks of cloudy weather without resorting to fossil fuels.

The red linethe result of subtracting wind power supply (blue) from demand (black)shows
the amount of power Xcel needs to generate with its fossil-fuel plants. The lighter lines are
forecasts.
Take the example of electric cars. A car stores enough electricity to power a house for anywhere
from half a day to several days, depending on the size of the battery pack. And it has
sophisticated power electronics that can control the timing and vary the rate of charging, which
could offer a way to match fluctuating wind power to electricity demand. With small
modifications, the cars batteries can deliver stored power to a home and to the power grid.
There arent many electric cars now, but that could easily change in the decades it will take
before renewable energy makes up more than 30 or 40 percent of the electricity supply (wind
supplies 4 percent now, and solar less than 1 percent).
At NREL, researchers can plug 30 electric cars into docks that let them interface with power-grid
simulations on a supercomputer, to project what would happen if thousands of cars were
connected to the grid. The idea is that electric cars might store power from solar panels and use
it to power neighborhoods when electricity demand peaks in the evening, and then recharge
their batteries using wind power in the early morning hours.
Forecasts like the ones being developed at NCAR will be absolutely critical, says Bri-Mathias
Hodge, a senior research engineer at NREL. They will help determine when the cars batteries
should charge to maximize the electricity they make available to the grid without leaving drivers
short of the power they need.
Even before that becomes a reality, though, forecasts from NCAR are already having a big
effect. Last year, on a windy weekend when power demand was low, Xcel set a record: during
one hour, 60 percent of its electricity for Colorado was coming from the wind. That kind of wind
penetration would have given dispatchers a heart attack a few years ago, says Drake Bartlett,
who heads renewable-energy integration for Xcel. Back then, he notes, they wouldnt have
known whether they might suddenly lose all that power. Now were taking it in stride, he says.
And that record is going to fall.
Kevin Bullis
Newest | Oldest | Top Comments
0.0345433648904 May 9, 2014
Here's my easy, and actually quite effective rule of thumb for judging desirable levels of solar,and wind
power in an area. You must first consider the climate.
If the climate of an area is tropical, or warm temperate, the peak demand in terms of watts will always be
in the day. Where I live, in piedmont North Carolina, the annual peak is always the summer peak. The
summer peak is in the afternoon, almost always.
Solar generation tracks peak demand particularly well, in the summer, since it is created by air
conditioning. It's ok if solar generation drops on cloudy summer days, because then, demand drops too.
Demand on cloudy summer days never reaches near yearly peak demand.
Wind does not track demand well in the summer, except when afternoon thunderstorms boost it. Even in
the winter, demand peaks occur in the morning, usually about 9:00 am. Unless a cold front comes
through in the morning, the generation won't track demand.
In cold temperate, or polar climates, the annual peak is always a very cold winter night, with a very high
wind. Not only that, winters are universally windier, and the air is even denser then! This is the perfect
venue for wind power.
In these climates, the summer peak will occur in the mornings, about the same time as the warm temperate
summer peak. Air conditioning is seldom an issue, unless there are large buildings involved. The fact
that the coldest days, in the winter, are almost always clear helps solar somewhat. In these climates
having mounts that orient the panels to the sun is particularly effective, in increasing annual output of
solar.
To simplify, solar where it's warm. Wind, and a little solar, where it's cold.
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Anumakonda May 1, 2014
Outstanding.
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
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mahonj May 1, 2014
An interesting question is how much wind or solar you can put on the grid before costs go up too much.
Solar is now very cheap, especially at commercial scale, and parts of the US are very sunny, so it should
be possible to add solar without any subsidy at all (not like Germany).

I am not sure what the figures are for wind, but I am sure it could be brought in with minimal subsidy.

However, there are still times when there is no sun (night) and no wind, so you have to keep all or most of
your original plant with the accompanying fixed costs.

"Someone" will have to pay for the idle plant and its workers waiting for their day.

On the other hand, there is already a big swing in energy use between day and night, which the grids have
to handle. This is very predictable (weeks, years in advance).

Now, you have another variability (say wind) which is predictable 1-3 days in advance - they should be
able to handle that, with the comment that the swings can now be larger when the intermittent source is off
and demand is high (still, cloudy days or nights in winter [in Northern parts]) or still, cloudy summer days
in southern parts.

Perhaps you could draw a graph of (solar+wind)% vs cost / kwH.

(Perhaps you could draw 100 graphs with different conditions and base load plants).

It would be interesting to look at the cost of 5, 10, 15% solar with solar prices from 2010, 2012, 2014 etc.

(Ditto for wind, but I would expect less price variability over the last 5 years).

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zdzisiekm May 1, 2014
@mahonj
"there are still times when there is no sun (night) and no wind, so you have to keep all or most of
your original plant with the accompanying fixed costs. 'Someone' will have to pay for the idle
plant and its workers waiting for their day."
Precisely. This is why these schemes always have the same effect, the cost of energy goes through the
roof. You are really better off not doing any of it at all. If and when energy storage technology becomes
cheap, reliable, and deployable in the grid context, which is not going to happen any time soon, then,
perhaps, it will make some sense to collect energy this way, but until then it's just waste of money.
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wilhelm woess May 1, 2014
@zdzisiekm @mahonj"it's just waste of money." It depends where to look. For big energy hungy
industries it is an competitive advantage, nowhere else in the E.U. copper and aluminum can be produced
cheaper than in Germany for example.
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zdzisiekm May 1, 2014
@wilhelm woess @zdzisiekm@mahonj
"nowhere else in the E.U. copper and aluminum can be produced cheaper than in Germany"
...which powers its plants with lignite.
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tribbda Apr 30, 2014
Every time I see someone allude to using electric cars as battery banks to smooth out power for the grid, I
laugh and wonder how clueless they are about consumers. Imagine plugging in your Nissan LEAF for 10
hours and suddenly, you have to run out for something in a hurry. Oh, the car is only half charged?
WTF? This will never work and people will balk at the company "de-charging" their batteries when they
think they are topping them up. Even if they agree to let the power companies do it, they will run into this
scenario and find it annoying. Plus, there is also the idea of reduced battery life for the car to consider
from all of the extra charge cycles this will induce. Call me skeptical on this approach.
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mahonj Apr 30, 2014
I don't see what the fuss is - lots of places in Europe have large percentages of wind or solar and they get
by.
All the US has to do is watch and do what works for the USA.
The better your prediction model, the less spinning reserves you have to run (for the renewables) and the
more efficiently you can run the system.
It takes the grid operators time to get used to non-dispatchable power sources (wind and solar) and to feel
comfortable working with it, but once they do, they can allow more and more on the grids.

It is a question of degree - you can probably go to 30% wind/solar [I don't count hydro as it is an "easy"
renewable (being dispatchable)] without too much fuss, after that, you end up with vast oversupply (such
as in Germany with too much solar on Summer afternoons). Then, you start to have to pay for reserve
capacity that is used infrequently, and you need a new pricing model, or a lot of long range high voltage
lines to export the excess power.

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zdzisiekm Apr 30, 2014
@mahonj
"lots of places in Europe have large percentages of wind or solar and they get by."
No, they don't. Intermittency is a big problem, so much so, German energy grid has been cut off by
Germany's neighbors, since it destabilized and threatened their own. In turn, the exorbitant cost of energy
generation in Germany resulted in German companies moving their facilities abroad, to other countries,
where energy is cheaper and more available.

The US incidentally has more wind power deployed than any country in Europe, nearly twice as much as
Germany and three times as much as Spain. Only China has more wind power deployed than the US and
even this not by much. The wind power growth in the US, in the last 5 years, has been twice as much as in
EU and three times as much as in Germany. Installed capacity, of course, is not the same as energy that's
really generated by these facilities, far from it. But even here, the US generated more than any other
country in 2012.

The largest producer of wind energy in the US is Texas, which produced more than twice as much energy
this way as California. Yet, as the percentage of total US power generation, wind accounts for 4.77% only.
It is really much ado about nothing--monumental and environmentally degrading waste of money. We
should not be doing this.
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wilhelm woess May 1, 2014
@zdzisiekm @mahonj"German energy grid has been cut off by Germany's neighbors, since it destabilized
and threatened their own."
Link please. I am not aware that we are cut off from our neighbourghs.

"the exorbitant cost of energy generation in Germany resulted in German companies moving their
facilities abroad, to other countries, where energy is cheaper."
German and Austrian companies invest in the U.S. because natural gas is so much cheaper there, and they
need it as resources to their processes, i.e. VOEST builds a direct reduction plant for iron pellets
production - 220 jobs, BASF builts a plant for 20 workers for the same reason in chemical processes.
April wholesale prices for German electricity are 20 % below the level of 2013 and 3,16 euro cents/ kwh
baseload on average in April 2014.
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wilhelm woess May 1, 2014
@zdzisiekm @mahonj"The US incidentally has more wind power deployed than any country in Europe,
nearly twice as much as Germany and three times as much as Spain."
I think it is a bit unfair to compare the large U.S. to any single country in the E.U. a better scale would be
to compare between them but this would be a bit unfair too, because the E.U. has 500 mio. citizens...
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zdzisiekm May 1, 2014
@wilhelm woess @zdzisiekm@mahonj
"I think it is a bit unfair to compare the large U.S. to any single country in the E.U."
We could compare NAFTA versus EU. Canada does not care much for wind and solar. It's a northern
country, where reliable energy delivery is a matter of life and death. But they do have a lot of hydro.
Quebec is a hydro-superpower, exporting energy to the US and still having enough to power its own and
Ontario's industry. In Mexico, 19% of electricity is produced by hydro. Although Mexico is a very sunny
country, there isn't much PV power generation, but they install, like Australia, countless solar water
heating systems on the roofs. This cuts a lot from electricity demand across the whole country.
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dmtk8 Apr 25, 2014
Captain Obvious to the rescue:

Intermittency is a problem only if you are not smart enough
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R Sweeney Apr 25, 2014
@dmtk8
There are some very smart people working on MW/GW scale storage.
Yet, outside of a few pumped hydro units, we have virtually ZERO of it installed due to continued
technical/safety/cost issues.
Eventually, it will become a smaller issue. But not this year. Or the foreseeable future.
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big.league.slider Apr 27, 2014
@dmtk8 If the US power grid is having difficulty managing the tiny fraction (<5%) of total electrical
power currently produced by wind and solar, just imagine how bad the problem would be if the amount of
electrical power produced from wind and solar was increased 5 times or more.
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jeffhre Apr 28, 2014
@big.league.slider @dmtk8 Easy to imagine, just like in Colorado or Texas today when inclement
weather has thrown, thermal and nuclear plants offline and poor old intermittent power has helped
generators to ride it through. That is part of what this article implies anyway.

Stronger modeling allows generators and operators to understand better what they are facing without the
need for extreme paranoia. If you read the entire article it stated Colorado not only faced the 5% national
renewable total, (14% if you include hydro for 2013)...

"Last year, on a windy weekend when power demand was low, Xcel set a record: during one hour, 60
percent of its electricity for Colorado was coming from the wind. That kind of wind penetration would
have given dispatchers a heart attack a few years ago, says Drake Bartlett, who heads renewable-energy
integration for Xcel. Back then, he notes, they wouldnt have known whether they might suddenly lose all
that power. Now were taking it in stride, he says. And that record is going to fall."

It's a learning curve and increased knowledge means some states are able to handle (that 5 times or more)
today without even the slightest paranoia of dread and imagination, "solar, just imagine how bad the
problem would be," instead they are building powerful models that help to answer that question.

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R Sweeney Apr 24, 2014
Yet another technology to bring the grid closer to the edge.

Time to buy that whole house diesel generator.
It's what they do in the third world.
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Jkirk3279 Apr 25, 2014
@R Sweeney

So, you read an article that proves the Utility can confidently predict and manage Renewable Energy, and
theyre just going to get BETTER at it.

And you decided that means the Grid will crash and burn, so you should buy a whole-house generator.

{facepalm}

Well, go ahead. Remember, the slower the diesel motor, the better longevity.

Ideally, with a bank of batteries and a Charge Controller, you could run the diesel only when you have
high demand and coast the rest of the time off grid.

I wouldnt do it NOW, though. Battery technology is about to EXPLODE, and todays expensive golf
cart batteries are going to be obsolete in two years.

You could consider a Natural Gas generator though, they ramp up quickly and some self-test at intervals.

Got to love that trick.
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wilhelm woess Apr 24, 2014
Excellent development, it shows that even originally sceptical large utilities can adapt to a situation with
more intermitiate renewable resources and even ev and other battery based backup systems, by intelligent
engineering and technlogy. They have leraned it seems that coal plants are costly and pollutant - what an
impressive achivement.
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R Sweeney Apr 25, 2014
@wilhelm woess
They have been forced by green-at-any-cost regulation to CLOSE 25GW of coal generation. Very
different.
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wilhelm woess Apr 25, 2014
@R Sweeney @wilhelm woessTrue, but they adapted to the new circumstances it seems and might have
an edge in the know how of integrating intermittant electricity sources not too bad for a conventional
utility. It seems NRG energy and some midwest utilities expand too into renewable electricty production,
not to mention Carlifornian utilities and those of Texas.
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Tyler Hains Apr 29, 2014
@R Sweeney @wilhelm woess Necessity is the mother of invention. In this case, a regulated necessity.
That is apparently the only necessity that will get us off fossil fuels.
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wilhelm woess Apr 29, 2014
@Tyler Hains @R Sweeney@wilhelm woessI think there is another more promissing otion: incentives are
the force behind invention. Incentives to the inventor and incentives to customers, when both are met a
new market takes off, when it is supported by subsidies for a short while (in form of research money or
market promotion) the better for inventors and customers.
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http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/526541/smart-wind-and-solar-power/