Sharing data from residential solar installations
Sharing data from residential solar installations lead image
As the world shifts from fossil fuels to a greater reliance on renewable energy, electric utilities and power grids must adjust to the unique requirements of renewable energy sources. One of those sources is distributed photovoltaic (PV) panels, typically mounted on the roofs of homes and businesses. These PV sources supply power primarily to their attached buildings but can also feed surplus energy to the grid and interact with distributed battery storage.
Visser et al. collected power measurements on 175 distributed PV systems in Utrecht, a province in the Netherlands, over a three-year period and published them as a freely available dataset.
“The power measurements have a 1-minute resolution and were collected from 2014 until 2017,” said author Lennard Visser. “Metadata with information on the PV system size, orientation, and location is included in a separate dataset.”
The team hopes their dataset will be useful for a wide range of research, such as studying PV energy as distributed grid energy, exploring PV-battery systems and distributed solar forecasting, and ensuring reliable grid operation.
In addition to the PV data, the researchers also published a quality control algorithm to sort and filter the data from this and other datasets. This filtering is essential in large datasets, and by publishing their algorithm, the team aims to standardize the quality control process to more effectively compare results from different datasets and introduce more reliability to the field.
“Transparency in and reproducibility of research are vital aspects of science and form the base for learning and developing further understanding within a scientific community,” said Visser.
Source: “Open-source quality control routine and multi-year power generation data of 175 PV systems,” by Lennard Visser, Boudewijn Elsinga, Tarek Alskaif, and Wilfried G. J. H. M. van Sark, Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (2022). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0100939 .
