A team of Cornell University environmental engineering researchers have developed a learning-based model to determine how much severe wildfire smoke will block the sun’s rays for solar power generation. The research found New York’s power systems operator severely underpredicted how much impact 2023’s wildfire smoke event would have on solar production. Professor Max Zhang says researchers used atmospheric data and forecasting technologies from NOAA. They’re looking specifically at past and any current atmospheric data.
“So, that’s also now the motivation for us to generate a tool that can provide more accurate, more reliable forecasts of renewable productions during those extreme events,” he said.
Even though wildfire events have a low probability of happening, Zhang says it’s all relative because it also has a high impact, when they do occur. Zhang’s research assistant Fenya Bartram explains what happens to solar power production during extreme events.
“So, when there's the wildfire, it will scatter the sunlight that's coming from the panels," she said. "So that will reduce the output from the panels and it's maybe not as much of a concern right now in the current system because there's not that much solar relative to other resources.”
However, Bartram points out that it has the potential of becoming a serious concern as New York’s electric grid becomes more reliant on renewable energy.
