Probabilistic Forecasts for Solar Uncertainty Management and Mitigation for Exceptional Reliability in Grid Operations (SUMMER-GO)

At last year’s annual meeting, we reported on our plans for the DOE-funded joint project, Solar Uncertainty Management and Mitigation for Exceptional Reliability in Grid Operations (SUMMER-GO), in which forecasts of the full probability distribution will be passed through decision support tools developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and integrated operations at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). We also reported on a sample evaluation of 5-minute probabilistic forecasts for lead times up to 2 hours using various ensembles of up to 48 members.

At this year’s meeting, we will report on our further progress using a large ensemble, including > 500 daily model runs passed through our irradiance and power forecast system and using a spatial ensemble for high-resolution models to compensate for most of the ensemble collections coming from coarser-resolution global ensembles. We will present results from two years of history forecasts for this much larger ensemble set for ERCOT solar farms and hypothetical build-out of solar farms in the interconnection queue, as well as for behind-the-meter forecasts for San Diego. We will cover transforming the large ensemble to reliable and sharp probabilities for near-term forecasts and day-ahead forecasts. Also, early results for running this system in real-time operational mode will be shown.