Emilio Cano Renteria ’23

Major

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Project Title

Wind and Solar Technology for the WeatherPower Tool

Presentation Link

View Emilio's Presentation

Certificate(s): Sustainable Energy, Applications of Computing, Statistics and Machine Learning

Climate Central’s online WeatherPower tool forecasts daily renewable-energy production in different counties, districts and states across the United States. It is useful for demonstrating the potential for sustainable electricity generation to interested or curious consumers. My focus was on, first, improving WeatherPower’s accuracy by updating its solar- and wind-energy capacity estimates for the whole country. With a better idea of how many solar panels and wind turbines exist, the tool is able to better forecast production on any given day. I then analyzed the forecasts that WeatherPower made in the past and identified trends in regional sustainable-energy generation. With nearly one year of stored daily generation estimates, I was able to see how electricity production behaves throughout the year and propose articles or reports that could be produced from these observations. To conduct this analysis, I learned how to use the programming language SQL and how to work with large relational databases. I also learned about the intricacies of the sustainable-energy industry, a field which I hope to enter after graduation.



Internship Year

2021

Project Category

Innovation and a New Energy Future

Organization(s)

Climate Central

Mentor(s)

Eric Larson, Senior Research Engineer, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University; Jennifer Brady, Manager, Analysis and Production, Climate Central