Session: Energy - Solar Scenario

This is a session of a GEOSS Architecture Workshop

A Presentation provided the topics for discussion for this session.

Results of the session are in this presentation.

Electricity Production by Solar Plants

1. Summary
   

   Investors and electricity producers willing to invest in solar plants need precise and thorough information to support decision-making. On their behalf, consulting companies perform feasibility studies in order to decide where to sit power plants and which technology to use ensuring a profitable return on investment. To reach that goal, consultants need an easy and unified access to data sets. Such data sets include meteorological, geographical and environmental parameters.

2. Context and pre-conditions

   Actors:

   • Investors and electricity producers
   • Consulting companies
   • GEOSS Portal integrator
   • Provider of specific application exploiting web services
   • Provider of data and web services

    

   Information available before scenario begins (via GEOSS portals)

   • Meteorological data
   • time-series of irradiance: daily values (database HelioClim, database NASA SSE)
   • sun position every three minutes over a year (SoDa Service)
   • uncertainty on each value (HelioClim database)
   • Geographical data
   • digital terrain model
   • ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflectance Radiometer) (unknown source)
   • SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) (DataForWind Service)
   • hydrological features: rivers, lakes, channels (unknown source)
   • gazetteer and locations: built-up areas
   • land use (CORINE Land Cover for Europe from DataForWind, unknown for the rest of the world)
   • Environmental data
   • protected areas (for Europe NATURA 2000, unknown source, unknown for the rest of the world)
   • maps of risks and hazards (unknown)

    

   Specific processing

   • assessment of irradiance on inclined surface (SoDa Service)
   • slope and exposition of the terrain (process from DEM to be done by Ecole des Mines de Paris)
   • shadowing due to terrain elevation (process from DEM and sun position service to be done by Ecole des Mines de Paris)

    

   GUI development and GEOSS portal integration

   • Exploit Web service description (GEOSS portal integrator)
   • Build GUI (GEOSS portal integrator)

     
     

3. Decision scenario

Step	Description
Step 0	The investor asks a consulting company for a study for a given geographical area
Step 1	The consulting company wants to obtain the necessary information and puts requests to the portal
Step 2	It fills the online form with the needed parameters: geographical bounding box, scale, valid user email address and the meteorological, geographical and environmental layers to be retrieved
Step 3	The specific application is invoked
Step 4	The specific application invokes various web services to retrieve meteorological information and the digital elevation model. It then invokes the specific processing web services. Finally it adds the user selected layers and combines them as a result
Step 5	The application pack the layers as an archive file and send an email to the consulting company
Step 6	The consulting company retrieve the archive, performs the study by exploiting the retrieved information and its own models and reports to the investor
Step 7	The investor takes a decision

4. References for the Solar Energy Scenario:

• The SoDa web site offering Web service to access the NASA SSE and HelioClim Databases of Solar Radiation: http://www.soda-is.com/eng/services/meteo_eng.html#ssehc
• Results of the IEA SHC Task 36 on-line survey: ” Customers' Requirements of Solar Energy Resource Information”: http://www.geoss-ecp.org/sections/solar/iea-shc-task36-survey-on

   

• The European project MESoR “Management and Exploitation of Solar Resource Knowledge”: http://www.mesor.org
• “Test of several approaches for the composition of web services in meteorology”, Proceedings of EnviroInfo 2007, Benoît Gschwind, Lucien Wald, Robert Mahl, Francois Irigoin and Lionel Menard: http://www.cri.ensmp.fr/classement/doc/A-387.pdf
• "A Proposal for a Thesaurus for Web Services in Solar Radiation" Benoît Gschwind, Lionel Menard, Thierry Ranchin, Lucien Wald, Paul Stackhouse, Proceedings of EnviroInfo 2007

5. Identified customers

Conergy (Germany) Solarworld (Germany) Lahmeyer International (Germany) Meteocontrol (Germany) DLR (Germany) CEA (France) Suez (France) Transfield (Australia)

Garrad Hassan (United Kingdom) Total Gas et Electricité (France) EDF EN (France) Gaz de France (France) International Conseil Energie (France) Photowatt (France) Tenesol (France)