Page 19 - North American Clean Energy January February 2018 Issue

Night vision for bird- and bat-friendly o shore wind power
e same technology that enables soldiers to see in the dark can also help protect birds and bats near o shore wind turbines.
Night vision goggles use thermal imaging, which captures infrared light that's invisible to the human eye. Now, researchers at the Department of Energy's Paci c Northwest National Laboratory are using thermal imaging to help birds and bats near o shore wind farms. PNNL is developing software called ermalTracker to automatically categorize birds and bats in thermal video. Birds and bats y over o shore waters, but they're di cult to track in such remote locations. e software can help determine if there are many birds or bats near an o shore wind project and if they could be a ected by the project. If that's the case, o cials can consider adjusting the location of a proposed project or modifying an existing project's operations. Biologists at the non-pro t Biodiversity Research Institute have tested the system to determine how well it identi es birds compared to their eld observations in Maine, one of the states considering o shore wind power.
PNNL | www.pnnl.gov
regulatory approval to retire coal- red plants. In many instances, these are being replaced with renewable energy generation. A major energy utility
plans to retire two of its Colorado coal plants ahead of schedule; in their place, a signi cant portion of the energy generation will come from wind. And in Texas, wind energy generation
is projected to overtake coal generation, after a 2.3 gigawatt coal plant shuts down in 2018.
While 2018 will likely yield more stories similar to what is happening
in Texas and Colorado, renewables’ long-term success is not guaranteed. e levelized cost of renewable energy will have to continue to drop, and its reliability and production will have to increase even more.
e advances in technology that make it possible to use data to predict problems before they occur, and provide greater visibility into renewable asset performance, could not have come at a better time.
Just as the past success of renewables in North America has been built on constant innovation, so will its future. In 2018, that is the only thing that is certain.
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Ryan Blitstein is the Vice President of renewable energy at Uptake, a predictive analytics company in Chicago.
Uptake | www.uptake.com
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