A Moment in the Sun: Solar Nowcasting from Multispectral Satellite Data using Self-Supervised Learning

ABSTRACT Solar energy is now the cheapest form of electricity in history. Unfortunately, signi.cantly increasing the electric grid’s fraction of solar energy remains challenging due to its variability, which makes balancing electricity’s supply and demand more di.cult. While thermal generators’ ramp rate—the maximum rate at which they can change their energy generation—is .nite, solar energy’s ramp rate is essentially in.nite. Thus, accurate near-term solar forecasting, or nowcasting, is important to provide advance warnings to adjust thermal generator output in response to variations in solar generation to ensure a balanced supply and demand. To address the problem, this paper develops a general model for solar nowcasting from abundant and readily available multispectral satellite data using self-supervised learning. Speci.cally, we develop deep auto-regressive models using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory networks (LSTM) that are globally trained across multiple locations to predict raw future observations of the spatio-temporal spectral data collected by the recently launched GOES-R series of satellites. Our model estimates a location’s near-term future solar irradiance based on satellite observations, which we feed to a regression model trained on smaller site-speci.c solar data to provide near-term solar photovoltaic (PV) forecasts that account for site-speci.c characteristics. We evaluate our approach for di.erent coverage areas and forecast horizons across 25 solar sites and show that it yields errors close to that of a model using ground-truth observations

Data-Driven Control, Modeling, and Forecasting for Residential Solar Power

Distributed solar generation is rising rapidly due to a continuing decline in the cost of solar modules. Most residential solar deployments today are grid-tied, enabling them to draw power from the grid when their local demand exceeds solar generation and feed power into the grid when their local solar generation exceeds demand. The electric grid was not designed to support such decentralized and intermittent energy generation by millions of individual users. This dramatic increase in solar power is placing increasing stress on the grid, which must continue to balance its supply and demand despite the potential for large solar fluctuations. To address the problem, this thesis proposes new data-driven techniques for better controlling, modeling, and forecasting residential solar power. The grid currently exercises no direct control over its connected solar capacity, but instead indirectly controls it by regulating new solar connections. This approach is highly inefficient and wastes much of the grid\u27s potential to transmit solar. Instead, we propose Software-defined Solar-powered (SDS) systems that dynamically regulate solar flow rates into the grid and design an SDS prototype, called SunShade. Specifically, we introduce a new class of Weighted Power Point Tracking (WPPT) algorithms, inspired by Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT), capable of dynamically enforcing both hard and relative caps on solar power, which enables the grid to decouple rate control from admission control. In contrast, to avoid grid regulations entirely, homes can also partially or entirely defect from the grid to fully utilize their solar power without restrictions. We present a switching architecture that enables homes to dynamically switch between a local generator, battery, and solar to co-optimize their cost, carbon footprint, switching frequency, and reliability. We introduce switching policies that reveal a tradeoff between solar utilization and reliability, such that higher solar utilization requires more switching, which can lead to lower reliability. Enabling better control of intermittent solar also requires improving solar performance models, which infer solar output based on current environmental conditions. Recent solar models primarily leverage data from ground-based weather stations, which may be far from solar sites and thus inaccurate. In addition, these weather stations report cloud cover---the most important metric for solar modeling---in coarse units of oktas. Instead, we propose developing solar models based on data from a new generation of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES-16 and GOES-17) that began launching in late 2017. We develop physical and machine learning (ML) models for solar performance modeling using both derived data products released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as well as the satellites\u27 raw multispectral data. We find that ML-based models using the raw multispectral data are significantly more accurate than both physical models using derived data products, such as Downward Shortwave Radiation (DSR), and prior okta-based solar models. The raw multispectral data is also beneficial since it is available at much higher spatial and temporal resolutions---1km^2 and every 5 minutes---than oktas---25km^2 and every hour. The accuracy of our ML-based models on multispectral data is also better regardless of whether they are locally trained using data only from a particular solar site or globally trained using data from many solar sites. Since global models can be trained once but used anywhere, they can also enable accurate modeling for sites with limited data, e.g., newly installed solar sites. Solar forecasting models, which predict future solar output based on environmental conditions also help in better solar control. Accurate near-term solar forecasts on the order of minutes to an hour are particularly important because homes and the grid must be able to adapt to large sudden changes in solar output. Current solar forecasting techniques, which primarily use Numerical Weather Predictions (NWP) algorithms, mostly leverage physics-based modeling. These physics-based models are most appropriate for forecast horizons on the order of hours to days and not near-term forecasts on the order of minutes to an hour. While there is some recent work on analyzing images from ground-based sky cameras for accurate near-term solar forecasting, it requires installing additional infrastructure. We instead propose a general model for solar nowcasting from abundant and readily available multispectral satellite data using self-supervised learning. Specifically, we develop deep auto-regressive models using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory networks (LSTM) that are globally trained across multiple locations to predict raw future observations of the spatio-temporal data collected by the recently launched GOES-R series of satellites. Our model estimates a location\u27s future solar irradiance based on satellite observations, which we feed to a regression model trained on smaller site-specific solar data to provide near-term solar photovoltaic (PV) forecasts that account for site-specific characteristics

Retrieval of surface solar irradiance from satellite imagery using machine learning: pitfalls and perspectives

Knowledge of the spatial and temporal characteristics of solar surface irradiance (SSI) is critical in many domains. While meteorological ground stations can provide accurate measurements of SSI locally, they are sparsely distributed worldwide. SSI estimations derived from satellite imagery are thus crucial to gain a finer understanding of the solar resource. Inferring SSI from satellite images is, however, not straightforward, and it has been the focus of many researchers in the past 30 to 40 years. For long, the emphasis has been on models grounded in physical laws with, in some cases, simple statistical parametrizations. Recently, new satellite SSI retrieval methods have been emerging, which directly infer the SSI from the satellite images using machine learning. Although only a few such works have been published, their practical efficiency has already been questioned. The objective of this paper is to better understand the potential and the pitfalls of this new family of methods. To do so, simple multi-layer-perceptron (MLP) models are constructed with different training datasets of satellite-based radiance measurements from Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) with collocated SSI ground measurements from Météo-France. The performance of the models is evaluated on a test dataset independent from the training set in both space and time and compared to that of a state-of-the-art physical retrieval model from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). We found that the data-driven model's performance is very dependent on the training set. Provided the training set is sufficiently large and similar enough to the test set, even a simple MLP has a root mean square error (RMSE) that is 19 % lower than CAMS and outperforms the physical retrieval model at 96 % of the test stations. On the other hand, in certain configurations, the data-driven model can dramatically underperform even in stations located close to the training set: when geographical separation was enforced between the training and test set, the MLP-based model exhibited an RMSE that was 50 % to 100 % higher than that of CAMS in several locations.</p

Hybrid Black-box Solar Analytics and their Privacy Implications

The aggregate solar capacity in the U.S. is rising rapidly due to continuing decreases in the cost of solar modules. For example, the installed cost per Watt (W) for residential photovoltaics (PVs) decreased by 6X from 2009 to 2018 (from $8/W to$1.2/W), resulting in the installed aggregate solar capacity increasing 128X from 2009 to 2018 (from 435 megawatts to 55.9 gigawatts). This increasing solar capacity is imposing operational challenges on utilities in balancing electricity\u27s real-time supply and demand, as solar generation is more stochastic and less predictable than aggregate demand. To address this problem, both academia and utilities have raised strong interests in solar analytics to accurately monitor, predict and react to variations in intermittent solar power. Prior solar analytics are mostly white-box approaches that are based on site-specific information and require expert knowledge and thus do not scale, recent research focuses on black-box approaches that use training data to automatically learn a custom machine learning (ML) model. Unfortunately, this approach requires months-to-years of training data, and often does not incorporate well-known physical models of solar generation, which reduces its accuracy. Instead, in this dissertation, we present a hybrid black box approach that can achieve the best of both to solar analytics. Our hypothesis is that the hybrid black-box approach can enable a wide range of accurate solar analytics, including modeling, disaggregation, and localization, with limited training data and without knowledge of key system parameters by integrating black-box machine learning approaches with white-box physical models. In evaluating our hypothesis, we make the following contributions: (Mostly) ML black-box Solar Modeling. To get benefits from both of ML and physical approaches, we present a configurable hybrid black-box ML approach that combines well-known relationships from physical models with unknown relationships learned via ML. Rather than manually determining values for physical model parameters, our approach automatically calibrates them by finding values that best to the data. This calibration requires much less data (as few as 2 datapoints) than training an ML model. And we show that our hybrid approach significantly improves solar modeling accuracy. (Mostly) Physical black-box Solar Modeling. The physical model used in the hybrid model above performs significantly worse than other approaches. To determine the primary source of this inaccuracy, we conduct a large-scale data analysis and show that the only weather metrics that affect solar output are temperature and cloud cover, and then derive a new physical model that accurately quantify cloud cover\u27s effect on solar generation at all sites. We then enhance our physical model with an ML model that learns each site\u27s unique shading effect. And we show that the hybrid modeling yields higher accuracy than current state-of-the-art ML approaches. We also identify a universal weather-solar effect that has not been articulated before and is broadly applicable to other solar analytics. Solar Disaggregation. Solar forecast models require historical solar generation data for training. Unfortunately, pure solar generation data is often not available, as the vast majority of small-scale residential solar deployments (\u3c10kW) are Behind the Meter (BTM) , such that smart meter data exposed to utilities represents only the net of a building\u27s solar generation and its energy consumption. To address this problem, we design SunDance, a black-box\u27\u27 system that leverages the clear sky maximum solar generation model, and the universal weather-solar effect from the hybrid black-box models above. We show that SunDance can accurately disaggregate solar generation from net meter data without access to a building\u27s pure solar generation data for training. Solar-based Localization. The energy data produced by solar-powered homes is considered anonymous and usually publicly available if it is not associated with identifying account information, e.g., a name and address. Our key insight is that solar energy data is not anonymous: every location on Earth has a unique solar signature, and it embeds detailed location information. We then design SunSpot to localize the source of solar generation data and show that SunSpot is able to localize a solar-powered home within 500 meters and 28 kilometers radius for per-second and per-minute resolution. Weather-based Localization. However, the above solar-based localization has a fundamental limit due to Earth\u27s rotation. To further localize towards a specific home, we identify another key insight: every location on Earth has a distinct weather signature that uniquely identifies it. Interestingly, we find that localizing coarse (one-hour resolution) solar data using weather signature is more accurate than localizing solar data (one minute or one second resolution) using its solar signature. Both of SunSpot and Weatherman expose a new serious privacy threat from energy data, which has not been presented in the past

Spatio-temporal solar forecasting

Current and future photovoltaic (PV) deployment levels require accurate forecasting to ensure grid stability. Spatio-temporal solar forecasting is a recent solar forecasting approach that explores spatially distributed solar data sets, either irradiance or photovoltaic power output, modeling cloud advection patterns to improve forecasting accuracy. This thesis contributes to further understanding of the potential and limitations of this approach, for different spatial and temporal scales, using different data sources; and its sensitivity to prevailing local weather patterns. Three irradiance data sets with different spatial coverages (from meters to hundreds of kilometers) and time resolutions (from seconds to days) were investigated using linear autoregressive models with external inputs (ARX). Adding neighboring data led to accuracy gains up to 20-40 % for all datasets. Spatial patterns matching the local prevailing winds could be identified in the model coefficients and the achieved forecast skill whenever the forecast horizon was of the order of scale of the distance between sensors divided by cloud speed. For one of the sets, it was shown that the ARX model underperformed for non-prevailing winds. Thus, a regime-based approach driven by wind information is proposed, where specialized models are trained for different ranges of wind speed and wind direction. Although forecast skill improves by up to 55.2 % for individual regimes, the overall improvement is only of 4.3 %, as those winds have a low representation in the data. By converting the highest resolution irradiance data set to PV power, it was also shown that forecast accuracy is sensitive to module tilt and orientation. Results are shown to be correlated with the difference in tilt and orientation between systems, indicating that clear-sky normalization is not totally effective in removing the geometry dependence of solar irradiance. Thus, non-linear approaches, such as machine learning algorithms, should be tested for modelling the non-linearity introduced by the mounting diversity from neighboring systems in spatio-temporal forecasting

STint: Self-supervised Temporal Interpolation for Geospatial Data

Supervised and unsupervised techniques have demonstrated the potential for temporal interpolation of video data. Nevertheless, most prevailing temporal interpolation techniques hinge on optical flow, which encodes the motion of pixels between video frames. On the other hand, geospatial data exhibits lower temporal resolution while encompassing a spectrum of movements and deformations that challenge several assumptions inherent to optical flow. In this work, we propose an unsupervised temporal interpolation technique, which does not rely on ground truth data or require any motion information like optical flow, thus offering a promising alternative for better generalization across geospatial domains. Specifically, we introduce a self-supervised technique of dual cycle consistency. Our proposed technique incorporates multiple cycle consistency losses, which result from interpolating two frames between consecutive input frames through a series of stages. This dual cycle consistent constraint causes the model to produce intermediate frames in a self-supervised manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at unsupervised temporal interpolation without the explicit use of optical flow. Our experimental evaluations across diverse geospatial datasets show that STint significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised temporal interpolation

Assessment of Renewable Energy Resources with Remote Sensing

The development of renewable energy sources plays a fundamental role in the transition towards a low carbon economy. Considering that renewable energy resources have an intrinsic relationship with meteorological conditions and climate patterns, methodologies based on the remote sensing of the atmosphere are fundamental sources of information to support the energy sector in planning and operation procedures. This Special Issue is intended to provide a highly recognized international forum to present recent advances in remote sensing to data acquisition required by the energy sector. After a review, a total of eleven papers were accepted for publication. The contributions focus on solar, wind, and geothermal energy resource. This editorial presents a brief overview of each contribution.About the Editor .............................................. vii Fernando Ramos Martins Editorial for the Special Issue: Assessment of Renewable Energy Resources with Remote Sensing Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 3748, doi:10.3390/rs12223748 ................. 1 André R. Gonçalves, Arcilan T. Assireu, Fernando R. Martins, Madeleine S. G. Casagrande, Enrique V. Mattos, Rodrigo S. Costa, Robson B. Passos, Silvia V. Pereira, Marcelo P. Pes, Francisco J. L. Lima and Enio B. Pereira Enhancement of Cloudless Skies Frequency over a Large Tropical Reservoir in Brazil Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 2793, doi:10.3390/rs12172793 ................. 7 Anders V. Lindfors, Axel Hertsberg, Aku Riihelä, Thomas Carlund, Jörg Trentmann and Richard Müller On the Land-Sea Contrast in the Surface Solar Radiation (SSR) in the Baltic Region Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 3509, doi:10.3390/rs12213509 ................. 33 Joaquín Alonso-Montesinos Real-Time Automatic Cloud Detection Using a Low-Cost Sky Camera Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 1382, doi:10.3390/rs12091382 ................. 43 Román Mondragón, Joaquín Alonso-Montesinos, David Riveros-Rosas, Mauro Valdés, Héctor Estévez, Adriana E. González-Cabrera and Wolfgang Stremme Attenuation Factor Estimation of Direct Normal Irradiance Combining Sky Camera Images and Mathematical Models in an Inter-Tropical Area Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 1212, doi:10.3390/rs12071212 ................. 61 Jinwoong Park, Jihoon Moon, Seungmin Jung and Eenjun Hwang Multistep-Ahead Solar Radiation Forecasting Scheme Based on the Light Gradient Boosting Machine: A Case Study of Jeju Island Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 2271, doi:10.3390/rs12142271 ................. 79 Guojiang Xiong, Jing Zhang, Dongyuan Shi, Lin Zhu, Xufeng Yuan and Gang Yao Modified Search Strategies Assisted Crossover Whale Optimization Algorithm with Selection Operator for Parameter Extraction of Solar Photovoltaic Models Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2019, 11, 2795, doi:10.3390/rs11232795 ................. 101 Alexandra I. Khalyasmaa, Stanislav A. Eroshenko, Valeriy A. Tashchilin, Hariprakash Ramachandran, Teja Piepur Chakravarthi and Denis N. Butusov Industry Experience of Developing Day-Ahead Photovoltaic Plant Forecasting System Based on Machine Learning Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 3420, doi:10.3390/rs12203420 ................. 125 Ian R. Young, Ebru Kirezci and Agustinus Ribal The Global Wind Resource Observed by Scatterometer Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 2920, doi:10.3390/rs12182920 ................. 147 Susumu Shimada, Jay Prakash Goit, Teruo Ohsawa, Tetsuya Kogaki and Satoshi Nakamura Coastal Wind Measurements Using a Single Scanning LiDAR Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 1347, doi:10.3390/rs12081347 ................. 165 Cristina Sáez Blázquez, Pedro Carrasco García, Ignacio Martín Nieto, MiguelAngel ´ Maté-González, Arturo Farfán Martín and Diego González-Aguilera Characterizing Geological Heterogeneities for Geothermal Purposes through Combined Geophysical Prospecting Methods Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 1948, doi:10.3390/rs12121948 ................. 189 Miktha Farid Alkadri, Francesco De Luca, Michela Turrin and Sevil Sariyildiz A Computational Workflow for Generating A Voxel-Based Design Approach Based on Subtractive Shading Envelopes and Attribute Information of Point Cloud Data Reprinted from: Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 2561, doi:10.3390/rs12162561 ................. 207Instituto do Ma

The Education and Research 3D Radiative Transfer Toolbox – Applications to Airborne and Spaceborne Observations of Cloud and Aerosol Radiative Effects

Satellite observations deliver essential information on clouds and aerosols and their radiative effects on a global scale, complemented by local and regional aircraft observations with a level of accuracy and detail that is often inaccessible from space. To obtain irradiances and radiative effects, satellite-derived cloud, aerosol and surface properties are fed into radiative transfer calculations, which can be validated with direct aircraft measurements. Often, this is only done for a fraction of the available observations, either because of the effort involved in analyzing large amounts of data, or because many real-world scenes are too complex for satellite retrievals to adequately capture. Examples include spatially inhomogeneous clouds that lead to significant biases in heritage imagery retrievals, thin clouds over bright and inhomogeneous surfaces that elude detection, and aerosols co-occurring with clouds that cannot be separately characterized without significant assumptions. The current frontier in radiation science is to embrace such challenging conditions, and confront satellite-derived radiative effects with aircraft observations systematically, rather than selectively. The Education and Research 3D Radiative Transfer Toolbox (EaR3T), developed in this thesis, serves this goal. It automatically acquires data from a variety of user-selectable sources and computes irradiance and radiance fields for entire aircraft flight patterns, satellite orbits, or simulated cloud databases. It facilitates the direct comparison with independent data, enables radiative closure studies at a large scale, and provides complex synthetic training data for machine learning algorithms. The thesis showcases findings for complex atmospheric conditions that arise from a systematic use of aircraft observations with automated processing methods: (1) a third of the clouds as observed above bright surfaces during an Arctic mission were not detected by state-of-the-art satellite algorithms, and the surface variability is a more significant modulator of the shortwave cloud radiative effects than the cloud properties themselves; (2) cloud transmittance derived from geostationary imagery is biased low by 10% against aircraft observations during a tropical mission due to coarse imager resolution and cloud inhomogeneity biases; (3) regional aerosol radiative effects can be obtained from a combination of aircraft and satellite observations with fewer assumptions than in satellite algorithms. The thesis closes with a way to put novel machine learning algorithms on a physical footing, opening the door for the mitigation of complexity-induced biases in the near future.</p