NEWS

July 01, 2019

Give me a Minute: Forecasting Solar Power Generation at the Minute Level

Picture of solar panels and red sunrise

Karsten Wurth/Unsplash

By Brittney Van Der Werff

Ever wonder what other team members of the NM SMART Grid Center are doing? You should.

Take the work of Computer Science Assistant Professor Abdullah Mueen, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Manel Martínez-Ramón, and their graduate students. Recently they developed techniques to forecast solar panel power generation in near real-time and with greater accuracy.

Effectively forecasting the amount of electricity that will be generated from variable energy sources such as solar at the minute level enables grid operators to effectively balance energy consumption and generation demands, which in turn decreases the amount of strain placed on electrical devices, systems, and the grid as a whole.

Fine-resolution forecasting techniques using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks models developed by this group further increase the possibility of incorporating higher levels of renewable energies into the electricity grid and brings our team closer to a smart grid future.