Updates on solar forecasting and other solar resource work of IEA PVPS Task 16

Patrick is the lead product manager for SolarAnywhere at Clean Power Research. In this role, Patrick focuses on how the solar industry and utilities can make better energy-related decisions with scalable weather data and intelligence solutions. Patrick brings a decade of experience working in the renewable energy industry, first in small hydropower project development, and then utility scale solar hardware product development. Patrick’s expertise includes decision analysis and resource allocation strategy and the title of his presentation is "“SolarAnywhere – Operational data services and applications”. Patrick earned a B.S. in Product Design from Stanford University.

Richard Perez leads solar energy research at University at Albany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center. He sits on the Advisory Board of the George Washington University’s Solar Institute, and has served multiple terms on the board of the American Solar Energy Society and as associate editor of Solar Energy Journal. He has produced over 250 journal articles, book chapters and conference papers. He holds US patents on energy storage, and load management using photovoltaics.

Having studied geography at ETH Zurich, Jan is the Head of Business of the Unit for Solar Energy and Climatology at Meteotest since 1993. He also operates as an expert at IEA SHC Task 46 and PVPS Task 14 of the International Energy Agency (IEA) as well as being project leader of Meteonorm. Jan is the Operating Agent of IEA PVPS Task 16 since 2017. 

Dave Renné served as President of the International Solar Energy Society from 2010 - 2019.  From 1991 until his retirement in 2012, Dr. Renné managed the solar resource assessment activities at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).  In 2012 he formed the consultancy Dave Renne Renewables.  He is dedicated to the concept of urgently achieving 100% renewable energy to meet all of our end use energy requirements as the best solution to the climate crisis. 

Dennis van der Meer received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a M.Sc. degree in Sustainable Energy Technology from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, in 2013 and 2016, respectively. Since July 2016, he has been a Ph.D. candidate with the Built Environment and Energy Systems Group, Uppsala University, Sweden, where he is developing probabilistic forecasting methods for solar power and electricity usage. His research interests include probabilistic and multivariate forecasting, and optimization. Dennis will present on “Space-time trajectories from probabilistic solar forecasts”.

Lennard Visser is a PhD candidate at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University in the Netherlands, since 2018. In 2015 he obtained his BSc degree Future Planet Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and in 2017 his MSc degree Energy Science at Utrecht University. In his PhD, Lennard investigates the short-term variability of solar power generation and models for short-term solar power forecasting. In particular, he focuses on the development of models that forecast the power output of single or aggregated PV systems on a regional level with a day-ahead or sub hourly time horizon. Lennard will present on “Benchmark analysis of day-ahead solar power forecasting techniques using weather predictions”.