Quantifying the Effects of Solar Panel Orientation on the Electrical Grid
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the prices of solar panels continue to decline, energy production from solar farms is skyrocketing, leading to a situation where, at certain times, solar farms produce more energy than can be consumed. Today, the only control over this excess electricity generation is curtailment, meaning excess power is wasted. A source of control that is often overlooked is the choice of orientation of fixed (non-tracking) solar panels: panels oriented towards the east, for example, produce more electricity earlier in the day and less later in the day, compared to similar panels oriented south. While this results in an overall reduction in generation, it matches solar generation with electrical grid load better, thus reducing curtailment. We use optimization to study the degree to which non-tracking panel orientation can be used to meet each of four possible grid requirements: load following, peak reduction, reduction in operation cost, and ramp reduction. Assuming complete control over the orientation of all panels, we find that, in the three jurisdictions we studied, i.e., Ontario, British Columbia, and Texas, orientation can be very useful in reducing ramps (reducing them up to 30%) but does not appear to be useful for reducing net load peaks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".