Linux Link @Burnaby

​Join us for our FREE monthly gathering that is not just a meeting --- it's a stepping stone to advancing your journey with Linux and Open Source Software. For this event, we feature practical application of OSS technology in an existing Industry.

​Technical Talk: How Open Source is applied in the Energy Industry
Speaker: Abed W. Ayyad, Masters in Science
Description: Combating global warming means two broad themes for the global economy: electricity will form a greater proportion of our energy use (“electrification”), and also that electricity will come (in some cases entirely) from non-polluting sources such as solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind power. We call this the “energy transition”. This presentation explores how open-source technology can support the energy transition. We start by exploring how meteorological factors such as wind speed and solar radiation allow us to predict the output from a wind turbine or a solar PV panel. We will demonstrate the use of open-source tools to model and predict these contributions for specific sites and the overall grid. Practical applications include downloading meteorological data via the NASA POWER API (using R), modeling solar PV output with Python's PVLIB library, and simulating wind turbine output with a simple Python script. Additionally, we will overview NREL's "REEDS" model for regional energy dispatch. By the end of the talk, attendees will have a good introduction to the use of open-source tools to model the performance of renewable energy sources. The R and Python scripts and the Excel data used will be shared via GitHub.