>>Rommel Glenn Mendova: The Himawari data set enabled our research to create a more
robust data to be used in a multicriteria decision making tool.
Mostly we used the data on the university itself.
We have calculated everything from the areas of the most suitable for solar PV installations
and their corresponding theoretical solar generation.
>>Cess Virtusio: I am very passionate about how analytics can drive renewable energy and
create social impacts especially for my nation in southeast Asia.
The objective was to use the RE Data Explorer to extract high fidelity solar resource data
along with meteorological data to train a machine learning algorithm that predicts solar
irradiance.
This algorithm can then be applied to other data sets from the Philippines and other parts
of the world.
And I aspire that in the future it will be used by organizations and communities in developing
countries such as my home country the Philippines to encourage investment in solar infrastructure
and educate and build livelihood for local communities.
>>Lucero Luciano De La Cruz: RE Data Explorer has been a very important tool to support
long term energy planning for Peru.
Our country is in an area of the world with a high potential for renewable resources.
Using the RE Data Explorer, our team published a document to allow agents in the energy sector
to state, business, and academia to have a technical reference for an evolution of solar
energy potential.
>> Luis Vilchez Leon: We try to promote investments in every technology and every resource.
And RE Explorer would make a good tool for investors to know more about the potential
in our country.
>>John Modin: We have a software that allows solar developers to find and evaluate utility
scale solar project sites.
We’re using it for two different things.
We have one site evaluation tool where the customers, solar developers go in, look for
sites using different search filters that we have built.
Solar resources is very important as part of that because we’re trying to build solar projects.
And the second thing we’ve done is we have had a number of customer engagements where
they’ve asked us to go deeper into specific areas and many of them in southeast Asia.
And here we use the Himawari data to figure out the feasibility of certain projects and
it was the solar resource data we used.
Of course we used also lots of other data layers to create a comprehensive picture of
the site and the opportunity and help evaluate where on the site would be a good idea or
if at all a good idea.
One of the sites that we helped evaluate has been – they have decided to build there.
That’s exciting.
>>Luis Carvajal Fernandez: For the factories that we have in Mexico we wanted to install
solar PV so for that one was specifically about predicting how much it would generate.
So that was a very useful tool and we put it inside our own internal tools based on
what we extracted from the data sets.
As part of the activities we have for social impact we are trying to plan a brief visibility
study for a solar impact project.
So we want it to be for communities, for local communities that could benefit from solar
and wind.
>> Rommel Glenn Mendova: I would absolutely recommend the use of the NREL Himawari data
set for the Philippines.
If the Himawari data set did not exist we would be having trouble in the statistical
robustness of the research.
>>Luis Carvajal Fernandez: One really good feature about this is that its really straightforward.
You just pin it or put the area geographically.
You kind of draw it and then you get what you need.
>> Luis Vilchez Leon: I think its important for us because there is, behind the RE Explorer,
there is support for modeling and data.
>>Lucero Luciano De La Cruz: The RE Data Explorer tool’s application allows the evaluation
of the renewable energy potential of Peru and use satellite data to better understand
our context wind and solar resources.
>>John Modin: If we didn’t have this data we would have to rely on some other hourly
data which is not as reliable.
So we would have to explain to all of our customers that you can’t really trust this
and that would have been embarrassing.
>>Cess Virtusio: I did not find any other tool that is seamless, extensive, customizable
and intuitive.
It is actually the best in class.
The RE Data Explorer made my life so much easier with it’s quick, no cost, and convenient
access to data.