Clean, sustainable energy and cost-savings are tempting prospects offered by renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, but predicting how much energy they’ll generate is spotty and difficult at best. A new website developed by researchers from Imperial College London and ETH Zurich present users with an interactive web tool capable of estimating the amount of energy generated by the wind and solar farms at any location.
Say you’re on the fence over whether solar panels make economic sense in your area, the website Renewables.ninja calculates how many kilowatt-hours of energy they will generate if installed on your roof, making it easier to determine whether or not the investment is worthwhile. Users specify the latitude and longitude coordinates of the desired location—or click on the interactive map—select a date range, input the size and orientation of a solar panel, or the height and type of wind turbine, then learn how much power the device can generate once installed.
Renewables.ninja performs its calculations by leveraging 30 years of observed and modeled weather data from NASA and other organizations to predict the wind speed’s influence on turbines and the amount of sunlight likely to strike the solar panels at any position on Earth. Manufacturer's specifications for wind turbine and solar panels are also taken into account, further increasing the accuracy of the prediction.
Dr. Iain Staffell, one of the lead researchers behind the website, built the tool primarily to aid in academic and industrial research, making it easier to account for complex weather systems and build variations—variables that would otherwise require a great deal of time and effort.
“If every researcher has to create their model when they start to investigate a question about renewable energy, a lot of time is wasted. So we built our models so they can be easily used by other researchers online, allowing them to answer their questions faster, and hopefully to start asking new ones.”
Staffell, together with his partner Dr. Stefan Pfenninger, predicted the total output of all future wind farms in Europe being constructed over the next 20 years and published their findings today in the journal Energy . He explains “Renewables.ninja has already allowed us to answer important questions about the current and future renewable energy infrastructure across Europe and in the UK, and we hope others will use it to further examine the opportunities and challenges for renewables in the future.”
Whether you’re planning to invest in renewable energy or not, you can still quickly peek in to see just how much power solar panels will generate in your neighborhood.
Source: Techxplore and Popularmechanics
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