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At the LF Energy Summit 2024 in Brussels, Sukhil Patel and Zakari Watts of Open Climate Fix presented the exciting progress of their Quartz Solar OS open source project. This innovative tool is designed to create more accurate solar forecasts and tackle one of the most critical challenges in transitioning to renewable energy sources: variability in energy production. A summary of the session follows, and the full video recording is at the end of this post.

What is Quartz Solar OS?

Quartz Solar OS is an open source solar forecasting model built by Open Climate Fix, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using AI to accelerate the transition to renewable energy. The platform aims to solve the challenges of predicting solar energy output by leveraging advanced machine learning techniques, satellite imagery, and weather data. Launched in early 2024, Quartz Solar OS offers a user-friendly, plug-and-play solution that can generate solar forecasts with just a few lines of code.

The Problem with Solar Variability

Renewable energy sources like solar and wind are inherently variable, making it difficult for grid operators to balance supply and demand. Historically, demand was the main variable, but as renewable sources increase, variability in supply is becoming more prominent. To avoid shortfalls, operators often keep reserves on standby, which leads to higher carbon emissions. Quartz Solar OS aims to address this by providing more accurate solar forecasts, potentially reducing CO2 emissions by up to 50 million tons annually.

Why Open Source?

By making Quartz Solar OS open source, Open Climate Fix seeks to drive faster adoption, foster innovation, and make the tool accessible to a global audience. The open source nature of the tool allows contributors to improve and expand its capabilities, benefiting both the community and the energy sector. Patel and Watts emphasized that the team’s goal is to build a collaborative environment, where users can not only use the tool but also contribute to its development.

How It Works: Machine Learning and Satellite Imagery

Traditional weather predictions, or numerical weather predictions (NWP), are often optimized for variables like wind rather than solar. Quartz Solar OS improves on these by using real-time satellite imagery, updated every five minutes. This allows the model to accurately predict solar energy by tracking cloud movements and other atmospheric conditions. Combined with advanced machine learning models, Quartz Solar OS creates highly accurate solar forecasts, even in regions with rapidly changing weather patterns.

Key Use Cases and Contributions

Quartz Solar OS serves a wide range of use cases, from national grid management to home energy optimization. The model is already being used by the UK’s National Grid, where it helps balance supply and demand more efficiently, potentially saving 200,000 tons of CO2 annually. In addition, the tool is highly relevant for smart homes equipped with solar panels, battery storage, and EV chargers, helping homeowners optimize their energy usage while minimizing emissions.

The platform also supports flexibility markets, which are becoming increasingly important as grid constraints rise. By integrating solar forecasts into home energy systems, Quartz Solar OS allows for better coordination of hardware like solar panels, batteries, and EV chargers.

Challenges and Community Building

Despite its success, the team at Open Climate Fix has faced several challenges. Managing large datasets and making them accessible to the community is one such obstacle. To address this, the team has worked to streamline their data ingestion pipelines and offer tools that reduce the time and resources needed to preprocess data.

In addition to making the tool more user-friendly, Open Climate Fix is focused on fostering a vibrant community. They host open office hours where users can discuss technical issues, get support, and contribute to the project. The project is also part of the Google Summer of Code, which helps bring first-time contributors into the open-source world.

What’s Next for Quartz Solar OS?

Looking ahead, Quartz Solar OS has ambitious plans. The team is expanding the tool’s functionality to serve more regions, including coal-heavy grids in India. Additionally, they are working on behind-the-meter generation modeling and demand forecasting, all aimed at improving grid stability and reducing carbon emissions.

The team is also collaborating with Google DeepMind to incorporate GraphCast, a state-of-the-art forecasting system that will further enhance the accuracy of their predictions, especially in regions with high solar potential like India.