Chapter 7 - Management of the Sun's power in real-time

Abstract

In the not so far away future, the demand for energy will highly rise as the global population grows and developing countries expand their economies. Renewable energy sources are a promising solution to these requirements with the most effective and efficient results. But because of the importance of solar energy in the world's energy balance and evolution, the renewable energy scenario requires an efficient and optimal energy planning and management, where Earth Observations (EO) play an important role. There exist many services, based on the knowledge, technology, and EO available data and information are providing real-time management of solar energy, like SOLEA, SoDa-pro, Solargis, and Solcast. SOLEA contributes to the scientific knowledge on solar radiation measurements and modeling research and also the development of applications related to renewable energy exploitation, planning, and management. SOLEA delivers many services but most importantly it provides solar energy management applications including continuous monitoring and short-term forecasts of solar energy in various scales. Solar radiation Data, SoDa, service provides historical, real-time data, and forecasts solar radiation and weather data while it represents a large improvement in data access in solar radiation domain, and it offers access to high quality information from diverse networked sources to public. Moreover, SolarGIS provides online access to high-resolution solar and meteosat data, PV simulation software, solar maps, Geographic Information System (GIS) database, and PV monitoring services for solar energy. And finally, Solcast is a global solar forecasting and historical solar irradiance data company which provides, through its databases, an important amount of historical data freely to the scientific community.