Renewable Energy Forecasting for Energy Integration

UL Solutions power forecasting services predict future wind and solar power production over the next several minutes out as far as the next several weeks. If you are an asset owner or utility responsible for scheduling or maximizing the profitability of wind or solar power market transactions, or if you are a system operator or utility looking to maintain a reliable transmission grid, our technology experts can optimize and customize the power forecasting services to align exactly with your needs and requirements. Forecasts are tuned to the exact location of the wind and solar plants, and we will optimize the use of all the on-site measurement data available to us to enhance forecasting quality, but we can still produce highly valuable forecasts even when no on-site measurement data is available. Our suite of advanced statistical and machine learning models’ forecasts is optimized for our customer’s application-specific needs.

Understanding changes in weather variables like temperature, wind speed and direction, irradiance and precipitation can create challenges to renewable plant management and grid optimization. UL Solutions provides weather variable forecasts that can be used as inputs into load forecasting models, situational awareness products, and other weather-sensitive applications. Our weather variable forecasts can be used to optimize energy sales and system reliability and provide advanced warning of changing renewables output and swings in load demands.

Extreme weather events mean something different for each of our customers and the unique challenges they face in their daily operations. UL Solutions creates forecasts of extremes that match your definition. Often forecasting for extremes focuses on events that cause significant or sudden renewable generation variability, cutouts or conditions that can impact plant or grid operations. These forecasts can be presented as the probability of an extreme event, event alerts, custom graphical outputs and scenarios of potential megawatt (MW) losses. From icing on turbine blades to snow on panels, extreme temperature impacts, to regional generation ramps, UL Solutions can create a forecast for your extremes.

Hindcasts — sometimes called a forecast of foregone energy or forecast of generation potential — are wind and solar generation predictions over a historical period (e.g., previous day, week or month) based on the resource potential. This is especially helpful if a plant was curtailed, and you need to understand how much energy could have been produced had the plant been operating at full capacity without imposed limits.

Developers and asset owners can optimally schedule construction activities, crane operations, blade installations, or repairs and avoid periods of high winds or other weather conditions beyond safe operating conditions with construction forecasting services. This forecast includes important information about wind, visibility, precipitation and fog.

UL Solutions' demonstrated ability to model the atmosphere and its impact on the local, regional or global energy industry and estimate the potential generation from a planned solar or wind plant sets us apart from the competition. We can help you by:

• Simulating the existing, planned future or hypothetical wind and solar plant generation and variability on multiple time scales, spanning monthly generation to second-by-second generation.
• Creating synthetic power forecasts for the same plants to assist with optimal power scheduling approaches or to inform schedulers how predictable generation might be at plants prior to the plant’s construction.
• Determining expected coincident generation from other existing or future centralized or distributed resources.
• Quantifying impacts from anthropogenic climate change on future increased variability or changes in wind and solar resources, wind and solar generation, changes in weather-driven events bringing icing, extreme winds, high or low temperatures, etc.