Comparing the carbon costs and benefits of low-resource solar nowcasting
This addresses grid integration challenges for solar energy by evaluating practical, low-resource solutions with environmental impact analysis.
The paper compared low-resource methods for solar PV yield nowcasting using UK satellite data over 1-4 hours and found that deploying such models can have carbon benefits orders of magnitude greater than their costs.
Solar PV yield nowcasting is used to help anticipate peaks and troughs in demand to support grid integration. This paper compares multiple low-resource approaches to nowcasting solar PV yield, using a dataset of UK satellite imagery and solar PV energy readings over a 1 to 4-hour time range. The paper also estimates the carbon emissions generated and averted by deploying models, and finds that even small models that could be deployable in low-resource settings may have a benefit several orders of magnitude greater than its carbon cost. The paper also examines prediction errors and the activations in a CNN.