Building the Sun4Cast System: Improvements in Solar Power Forecasting

AbstractAs integration of solar powerinto the national electric gridrapidly increases, it becomes imperative to improve forecasting of this highly variable renewable resource. Thus, a team of researchers from the public, private, and academic sectors partnered to develop and assess a new solar power forecastingsystem, Sun4Cast. The partnership focused on improving decision-making for utilities and independent system operators, ultimately resulting in improved grid stability and cost savings for consumers. The project followed a value chain approach to determine key research and technology needs to reach desired results.Sun4Cast integrates various forecasting technologies across a spectrum of temporal and spatial scales to predict surface solar irradiance. Anchoring the system is WRF-Solar, a version of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) numerical weather prediction(NWP) model optimized for solar irradianceprediction. Forecasts from multiple NWP models are blended via the Dynamic Integrated Fo...