Renewable Energy Laboratory (REL) provides power forecasting and asset management services for renewable power generation and integration, which makes renewable more predictable, manageable, and profitable.
8353
PV systems installed monthly
142
thousands total installations
51.3
systems are performing under capacity
Our Mission
In Australia, Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) are paid by power plants based on the “causer pays factor” calculated with AEMO. For solar and wind power plants, the “causer pays factor” is proportional to the difference between actual power generation and power forecast made by AEMO. However, these forecasts can be extremely inaccurate and a 100MW solar power plant can be charged over $500, 000 for this issue, which increases the cost of operation and also technically limit the capacity of renewable can be connected to the grid.
Renewable Energy Laboratory (REL) is a start-up specialising in data analysis of renewable energy. We own market-leading photovoltaic modelling and solar energy assessment technology, which was originally invented and developed by the company’s founders at the world’s top solar research group in UNSW Sydney. Based on our research on power plant modelling and special AI algorithms for short-term weather forecast based on satellite images, we developed power forecasting technology, “PVMasterTM Power Forecast”, which helps solar and wind farms to reduce their FCAS cost and enables more clean power to be connected to the grid.
In addition to the economic benefits of our services, dispatch can be much more optimised and be able to accommodate more generation capacity from solar and wind with our forecasting technology.
Our Value
We developed a new method to model the optical properties of solar devices. The responses of solar devices under illumination are thoughtfully considered in details. When it is used to model the system performance, it takes the simulation into a new level. Not only daily isolation is used, it is expanded in both time and spectrum scale to generate more accurate estimation of power output. Thus we can evaluate your PV system more precisely.
Update
We join EnergyLab’s 2020 accelerator program.
Our Team
Yang Li
Co-founder
Dr. Yang Li is the co-founder of the Renewable Energy Lab. He wants to make real-world impacts with his learnings and researches in renewable energy. He is now an ARENA research fellow in the University of New South Wales (UNSW) working on modelling of solar systems. He earned his Ph.D. from UNSW with Australian International Postgraduate Research Scholarship. During his Ph.D., he developed a unique modelling method for solar systems, which is the core technology of REL. Before his PhD study, he finished a double-degree bachelor program from Zhejiang University (Major: Opto-Electronics Engineering) and University of New South Wales (Major: Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy) in 2011 with First Class Honor.
Zi Ouyang
Co-founder
Dr. Zi Ouyang is the co-founder of the Renewable Energy Lab. He has more than a decade of experience in clean energy research from commercial-ready technologies to blue sky science. His research expertise covers energy generation-storage solutions, advanced photovoltaic devices, renewable energy system designs, new materials, etc. He was an Australian Renewable Energy Agency Fellow from 2013 to 2016. Prior to that position, he was a Post-doctoral Fellow in Victoria-Suntech Advanced Solar Facility, conducting R&D research for Suntech Power. He obtained his PhD at School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Australia in 2011, and a Bachelor degree in Physics at Nanjing University, China in 2005.