Davy Theophile works as a Head of Renewable Energy at Vaisala. His responsibilities include overseeing global sales, market and product development for Vaisala’s solar and wind energy segments and ensuring a positive customer experience. With 25 years of engineering, strategy, and business experience in the energy sector, including hydropower, energy storage, solar power, and grid solutions, Davy plays a vital role in advancing Vaisala’s ambitious strategy in the renewable energy industry.
Through this article, Davy Theophile highlights the critical role of accurate weather data in advancing renewable energy. He discusses how advanced weather monitoring technologies, such as lidar and all-in-one weather stations, enhance the efficiency and reliability of wind and solar energy projects.
Driven by the
growing demand for sustainable energy and the
plummeting costs of green technologies, our world’s transition to renewable energy sources is rapidly accelerating. But realizing a clean energy economy by harnessing the immense potential of the sun’s rays and the planet’s currents of moving air demands innovation and progress.
In an evolving energy ecosystem, where the pursuit of renewability meets the challenge of powering our world with the unpredictable forces of wind and sunlight, the path toward a sustainable future remains obscured by inefficiency and uncertainty without accurate weather information.
From cutting-edge light detection and ranging—or lidar—solutions precisely mapping out wind flows to all-in-one weather stations illuminating the complex atmospheric dynamics influencing solar panel performance, advanced weather monitoring solutions help improve efficiency, profitability and environmental stewardship at wind and solar farms globally.
How Accurate Weather Intelligence Drives Renewable Energy Success
Weather data plays a multifaceted role throughout the life cycles of renewable energy projects, influencing various aspects — from site selection and system design to ongoing maintenance and safety protocols.
During the development phase, historical meteorological measurements inform critical decisions about site selection, system design and turbine or solar array layout. Analyzing long-term climate patterns reveals the locations best suited for harnessing the full potential of wind or solar resources over the project’s lifespan. Continuously monitoring wind speeds, gusts, wind shear, solar irradiance, temperature and other atmospheric factors once energy generation assets are operational helps renewable energy companies tweak their operations in response to changing conditions to maximize output and revenues.
Accurate weather data is essential for maximizing energy capture, enhancing production efficiency, and ensuring the long-term viability of renewable energy infrastructure.
Weather data also helps ensure project safety and resilience.
Increasingly frequent severe weather events like lightning strikes or extreme winds can damage equipment, disrupt operations and endanger personnel without proper monitoring and risk mitigation protocols informed by real-time environmental intelligence.
Leveraging accurate information equips developers and operators to make informed decisions that maximize energy capture, enhance production efficiency and ensure the long-term viability of renewable energy infrastructure.
Lidars: Sensing Wind Behavior to Unlock Wind Energy Potential
Technological innovations in remote sensing technologies—like lidar—provide developers, operators and turbine manufacturers with bankable and accurate data for project financing.
Lidar data also informs wind farm output and performance predictions. Precisely measuring wind speeds across a broad range of heights, lidars can map out wind flow patterns and shifts in direction across an entire project site. This comprehensive visibility into wind behavior is useful for wind resource assessment and operational forecasting.
The inherent mobility of lidar systems is also a major asset, allowing easy deployment and repositioning across complex terrains like hills, mountains and forests. Lidar’s flexibility gives wind farm planners and operators a far more complete picture of site conditions to guide development decisions and production forecasts.
Critically, lidar offers clear advantages over traditional meteorological masts, which can only measure at limited heights far below the hub heights of modern wind turbines. By contrast, lidar captures data at the turbine’s actual operating heights up to 300 meters, eliminating the need to extrapolate measurements from lower altitudes.
Given lidar’s proven accuracy, reliability and agility, leading wind energy companies have embraced the technology as a primary or even standalone measurement tool, demonstrating a project’s potential financial viability and improving wind farm projects at every stage.
All-In-One Weather Monitoring for Solar Power Farms
For the solar industry, automatic weather stations equipped with specialized sensors are now indispensable tools for development and operations. These integrated monitoring systems continuously measure solar irradiance levels and a comprehensive suite of meteorological parameters—wind speed, wind direction, ambient temperature, precipitation, photovoltaic module temperature, relative humidity and atmospheric pressure.
This comprehensive view of environmental conditions illuminates the complex interplay of factors influencing solar panel performance and energy generation forecasts. By collecting weather data, solar energy companies can better plan system designs, evaluate the potential impacts of climate patterns such as cloud cover, dust accumulation, etc and even understand auxiliary effects like the role of wind speeds in cooling photovoltaic modules.
These weather monitoring platforms’ true power, however, lies in advanced data quality control. Leveraging sophisticated algorithms, the systems can analyze the raw weather readings to detect anomalies, identify trends and extract insights to guide operational decision-making and production optimization strategies.
A Greener Tomorrow, Powered by Weather Data
As the renewable energy transition accelerates, wind and solar power developers, asset owners and operators increasingly turn to sophisticated environmental monitoring technologies to unveil the impacts of atmospheric conditions. Precise, site-specific weather intelligence empowers more informed decision-making, enhanced operational efficiency, optimized power generation and improved project economics.
With individuals and governments worldwide rallying to combat climate change and transition away from fossil fuels, weather monitoring solutions like lidar and automatic weather stations will support harnessing our planet’s renewable power potential.
