WELCOME TO THE SWRESoftware for Renewable Energy - Bay Area

23Feb12 Meetup: Intro to SWRE

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AGENDA• 7:00 to 7:20 - snack-up and socialize

• 7:20 to 8:00 - “presentation”

• 8:00 to 8:30 - follow-up discussion

• 8:30 to 9:00 - grab another drink and continue getting to know your brethren

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GROUND RULES

• Eat and drink throughout

• Interrupt me at any time

• Share your experiences and opinions and details of your favorite projects (past and present)

• Stay around and chat after the presentation

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WHO ARE WE?• Software (SW) professionals/amateurs/hobbyists

• Renewable Energy (RE) industry observers/professionals/fanboys

• people who passionately care about the impact of RE on our lives, the planet, the other 7 billion people we live with

• people who want to use their skills and experience in an industry that really matters

• no offense... but do we really need another mobile ad-driven geo-aware nano coupon-clipping synergy farmville social gaming app or do we need to do our part to make RE make financial sense for everyone in the world?

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OUR GOALS!• Make RE a sexy industry for SW professionals (or even just the Energy

Industry, in general)

• Why doesn’t one of the worlds largest, most profitable1, most dynamic, most complicated industries get more love?

• We are a group of people who passionately care about our SW projects and also RE’s place in the future

• Yet, I feel like we meet and cross-pollinate less than SW professionals in other industries

• There are web 2.0 hack-a-thons nearly every week here in the Bay area. When was the last time you heard about an energy 2.0 hack-a-thon?

51: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/performers/companies/profits/

!OUR GOALS• “Religious” debates (too many other meetup groups devolve

into these dogmatic arguments):

• Python vs. Perl; Windows vs. Linux; Django vs. RoR; compiled vs. interpreted; simple scripts vs. full-on OOP; Emacs vs. vi; git vs. SVN

• Further, we don’t want to crown one RE sub industry (solar, wind, hydro, bio fuels, etc.) as king... all need to grow and all need more skilled SW experts to do so

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WHO AM I?• I’m Dave

• I studied CompEng and CS

• I started a company called Elevated Systems which currently does some SW consulting

• I’ve spent about 6 years playing with RE

• almost all in or around the solar industry... I will always be skewed towards solar

• I’ve spent about 3 years playing with Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)

• vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure safety applications

• I have biases:

• SW: C++, Python, Django, PyQt, jQuery, Linux, Mac

• RE: Solar, SmartGrid, EVs

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WHO ARE YOU?

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•Name

• Company (optional)

•What thrills you the most about SW? RE?

•What’s a recent project you’ve worked on that you’re excited about?

WHERE DOES SW LIVE IN RE?• Everywhere:

• controls, factory automation, data management and visualization, system modeling, financial modeling...

• But I’ve got 2 specific examples based on personal experiences:

• system modeling AND data collection/management/visualization

•What are yours?

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EX: SYSTEM MODELING

• Problem Statement: Simulate the power production of a solar field.

• mathematically model a solar cell

• represent all of the attributes: open-circuit voltage (Voc), short-circuit current (Isc), max power (Pmp), series resistance (Rs)

• build that up into a panel

• number of cells, optical losses, wiring resistive losses, etc.

• put panels and combiners and inverters together into a field

• more losses to model... so much wire

• simulate the performance of that field throughout the course of the year

• tweak some variables and repeat (maybe even optimize?!)

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EX: SYSTEM MODELING - BASIC

class SiSolarCell(object):

Isc_amps = 0.05

Voc_volts = 0.6

R_series_ohms = 0.001

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class Panel(object):

cell_array = [SiSolarCell()]*40

optical_loss_percent = 0.95

resistive_loss_percent = 0.95 class Field(object):

panel_array = [Panel()]*100

resistive_loss_percent = 0.95

inverter_max_voltage_volts = 300

EX: SYSTEM MODELING - NOW W/ OOP

class SiSolarCell(object):

Isc_amps = 0.05

Voc_volts = 0.6

R_series_ohms = 0.001

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class SuntechPanel(Panel):

cell_array = [SuntechSolarCell()]*40

class Field(object):

panel_array = [SuntechPanel(), TrinaPanel]*100

resistive_loss_percent = 0.95

inverter_max_voltage_volts = 300

class SuntechSolarCell(SiSolarCell):

Isc_amps = 0.07

class TrinaSolarCell(SiSolarCell):

R_series_ohms = 0.0005

class TrinaPanel(Panel):

cell_array = [TrinaSolarCell()]*45

EX: SYSTEM MODELING - RECAP

• What’s next?

• simulate production performance in various weather conditions, mounting strategies, etc.

• add in financial costs

• set some hard constraints and some variables (number of panels, number of inverters, etc.) and optimize

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• Which tools to use?

• Python (bias alert!!), Matlab, Excel (with VB)

• anything with some basic OOP capabilities, GUI construction, and graphing/reporting packages

• Who cares? (aka: where to work)

• System Integration companies

• Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) firms

• Residential Full Service Providers (like SolarCity)

EX: DATA MANAGEMENT

• Problem Statement: Collect and analyze the actual power production of a solar field.

• collect data from various sources, sensors (ex: irradiance sensors, inverters, tracking sensors)

• transport that data off-site to some data archive

• visualize data in some central portal for field owner/operator/stakeholders

• provide some remote control mechanisms... bring some parts of the field online/offline (maybe through trackers or inverters)

• alert stakeholders of problems at the field

• analyze data to spot performance trends over time (weather, soiling, cell degradation)

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EX: DATA MANAGEMENT - COLLECT

• Start with an embedded PC in the field or just an embedded micro controller (PIC, Atmel/Arduino)

• Interface with sensors using some common industrial protocols (RS232, RS485, MODBUS, CAN, analog voltages)

• irradiance sensors and weather stations

• inverters

• Write an program to periodically collect all data

• Automatically respond to certain field conditions

• ex: high-wind stow

• Skills needed: embedded systems programming, communications protocols knowledge, maybe even some circuit design

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EX: DATA MANAGEMENT - TRANSPORT

• Start with a connection to the internet

• maybe we need cellular or satellite service (M2M)

• Package up collected data (XML, JSON, etc.)

• Setup an encrypted channel to DB (SSH, VPN, SSL, etc.)

• Push to DB server

• use raw SQL transactions, RPCs, or maybe a modern REST interface

• Skills needed: networking knowledge, data compression and security knowledge, DB knowledge

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EX: DATA MANAGEMENT - ANALYZE

• Build a GUI application or web application to access the DB and visualize collected data

• Take the next step to help the user see trends in their data more clearly using data mining and analysis techniques

• Skills needed: GUI programming, basic data analysis, web application development (front-end and back-end: HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, RoR, Django, .NET, Java, web operations, etc.)

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EX: DATA MANAGEMENT - RECAP

• What’s next?

• make the data accessible on a mobile application

• use data trends to drive engineering decisions (long term soiling has much greater production impacts on module X than Z)

• Who cares? (aka: where to work)

• field owners and financial stakeholders

• field installers

• RE data aggregators (FatSpaniel/PowerOne, Draker Labs, ArgusOn, etc.)

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NEXT MEETUP IDEAS• Not so technical:

• crash course in policies that matter to SWRE members

• Federal laws and mandates, CA laws (ex: AB32)

• meta discussions about RE industry

• what’s the state-of-the-art for various technologies?

• does renewable == clean?

• RE growth is driven by finance... why should we care?

• More technical:

• fault tolerance and reliability in SW for RE

• how to build a DB schema for RE data

• Your ideas will probably be better...

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QUESTIONS

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