California, Hawaii Solar Researchers Look For Ways to Make Solar More Reliable
Thursday, September 30th 2010 9:00 AM
By GetSolar Staff.
As fossil-fuel energy becomes harder to extract and more expensive, renewable sources of power like solar arrays and wind turbines will have to take up a greater portion of the global energy supply. These sources have many well-documented benefits, from driving investment and jobs in green technology to the tiny environmental impact of solar power.
Solar's main flaw, on the other hand, is intermittent generation - the fact that it can't work at night or when rain and clouds sweep in.
To help predict fluctuations in solar panel output and react accordingly, researchers at the Sandia National Laboratories and at the University of California in Merced are studying the problem, reports the the New York Times' Green blog.
Using sensors at the 1.2-megawatt La Ola Hawaii solar installation, the Sandia team is monitoring cloud activity and solar panel output at one-second intervals.
"Our goal is to get to the point where we can predict what's going to happen at larger scale plants as they go toward hundreds of megawatts," Scott Kuzmaul, a researcher at the facility, told the Times.
The data will help utilities and solar installers pick the right sites for new solar installations, and will aid efforts to create smart grids that can smooth over the natural fluctuations in solar power output.
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As fossil-fuel energy becomes harder to extract and more expensive, renewable sources of power like solar arrays and wind turbines will have to take up a greater portion of the global energy supply. These sources have many well-documented benefits, from driving investment and jobs in green technology to the tiny environmental impact of solar power.
