What’s happening at Open Climate Fix? An Update.
There is certainly a lot going on in the world right now, and we hope everyone reading this blog post is in good health. While it is hard to think about anything else right now, the challenge of climate change is no less urgent. We wanted to give an update on what's happening at Open Climate Fix.
Firstly, it’s encouraging to see emissions going down in the short term, we are hoping to create a world where we can lock in those gains for the long term! Many things have happened here at Open Climate Fix since our last blog post, so here’s an update. Let’s look at the current status of our two big projects: Nowcasting and PV Mapping.
Why do we work on these projects again?
Let’s start with our two projects: They both directly work towards our current goal, which is to predict how much electricity will be produced by solar photovoltaic (PV) panels over the next few hours (called "nowcasting"). More about why we work on nowcasting can be found on our project page. In short: Solar Photovoltaics are awesome, but it is hard to predict their power output. A big cloud will cause solar electricity generation to drop. That’s bad, because electricity supply must match demand at every moment.
To protect against drops in PV electricity generation (read: big clouds), electricity grid operators instruct some fossil-fuel generators to run below their maximum capacity. If PV generation drops, grid operators instruct these "spinning reserve" generators ramp up quickly to cover the lost PV generation. Supply and demand are kept in balance.
While “spinning reserve” sounds great at first, that usually means having a fleet of natural-gas turbines running at low efficiency (gas turbines are less fuel-efficient and carbon-efficient when throttled back). If we knew with greater certainty that there won’t be any big clouds in the next few hours and thus PV generation won’t go down, we could tell the grid operators to commit to a smaller number of generators, each running close to their maximum capacity; rather than committing to a large number of generators running below their maximum capacity and hence running at low efficiency.
We estimate, conservatively, that better PV forecasts could reduce UK CO2 emissions by 100,000 tonnes CO2 per year (although this number is very hard to estimate with precision!). This estimate goes up to 100 million tonnes of CO2 globally by 2030. More about our assumptions and how we got to that estimate can be found in our “original” OCF doc.