Kleissl Solar Resource
Assessment and Forecasting Lab

Solar resource assessment (How much solar radiation can be typically expected?) and forecasting (How much solar radiation can be expected in the next hour or next day?) are critical to expanding the penetration of solar power on the electric grid. Kleissl collaborates with the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and was selected by the California Energy Commission and California Solar Initiative to conduct solar resource assessment and forecasting for the state of California. The map on the right shows a screenshot of our Google Earth Map global horizontal incident solar irradiance for the state of California. Save this file as .kmz and open in Google Earth.

Satellite remote sensing models (above left), numerical weather prediction (above center), and ground sensors (above right) are used to provide solar forecasts for time horizons from 10 minutes to 72 hours. The map on the top left shows GOES satellite GHI [W/m²] for the San Diego area at 1 km resolution. Clouds (east half) cause a substantial reduction in GHI. The coast is visible due to satellite navigation errors. Cloud motion vectors are applied to forecast the movement of the clouds. North American Model (NAM) output from the National Weather Service is shown on the bottom left for a storm system moving through California.

At the UCSD campus advanced sky imager technology is applied to get a fine-grained picture of local clouds. Real-time images of the La Jolla skies produce solar output forecasts for 1 MW of dispersed solar PV that will be utilized by a microgrid scheduler/optimizer to enable supply, storage and load adjustments based on dynamic market price signals (below right).

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