Exploring Alberta’s Solar Resource through R

We're happy to have a wonderful speaker and topic to start our first virtual meetup. Abed W Ayyad (https://manipulativegerbil.blogspot.com/) will share his exploration of solar PV and how R can be used for solar PV in Alberta.

Solar energy converted to electricity (photovoltaic, or PV, electricity) seems almost too good to be true when it comes to thinking about ways of reducing global carbon emissions. According to a widely repeated claim, one hour's worth of the solar radiation which falls on the earth's surface could meet human energy needs for one year. Though impressive and technically "correct", this is far from being a practical or meaningful calculation. So how much carbon-neutral electricity could someone sitting in the Canadian prairies actually harvest from the sunshine falling on their backyard?

R lends itself perfectly to the data intensive task of planning and predicting the amount of solar insolation which falls on a given location, and the electricity which one can expect to harvest from it. Following a (very) broad introduction to solar energy and photovoltaics, we will explore a number of packages available in R which make it possible to access and analyse publicly available data on solar insolation, and to understand what this might mean in terms of solar PV potential at a site in Alberta. We will accomplish the latter by doing a walk-through of an example using the nasapower package available in CRAN, as well as a number of the graphics and GIS-related packages also available in R. This talk, aimed at a wide audience of R users, will illustrate why Alberta is a surprisingly perfect location for solar PV deployment and how you can convince yourself of that using R.

About the speaker: Abed has used R in a variety of settings for seven years now, for GIS/cartography applications, data analysis and linear optimisation. There are many reasons to love R, but the community of users is definitely one of the biggest. Last September, Edmonton became the 10th city which Abed has called home during his life. Abed is looking forward to discovering more of the city, and to cycling to some parks and lakes as the summer goes on and the days get longer.