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Predicting Belgium’s future solar PV generation: Part II

This is part two of a two-part series. Part one covered collecting and processing the data, then assessing the forecasts in the dataset. It also contains the link to the dataset and repo. This part covers my predictions, using machine learning. Intro OK, we’ve looked at the data, and we’ve seen how accurate their predictions are/were. Can I do any better? I’m taking three approaches: SARIMA, TensorFlow, and Prophet. A quick aside: Why do we want to predict the future energy generation? There are a number of reasons.

Friday, November 8, 2024 | 15 minutes Read
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Predicting Belgium’s future solar PV generation: Part I

This is part one of a two-part series. This part covers collecting and processing the data, then assessing the forecasts in the dataset. Part two covers my predictions. Intro I have a friend who owns a solar management platform, and he asked me to investigate some solar PV generation data provided by Elia, one of Belgium’s transmission system operators. The data includes measured solar PV generation by region, along with their various forecasts.

Sunday, November 3, 2024 | 15 minutes Read
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Imagining the Future of Energy

The harnessing of energy is one of the most transformative shifts in human history. Controlling fire enabled the cooking of food, which potentially led to an increased brain size; coal and the steam engine powered the industrial revolution, initiating accessible intercontinental travel and the spread of culture; and oil turned multi-week voyages into multi-hour trips - and our first steps off the Earth. Energy has been instrumental in human civilisation - and will continue to be so into our future.

Wednesday, February 8, 2023 | 7 minutes Read
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Wind and Solar Potential

Which countries have the most potential for wind and solar power? PV Potential Based on data from https://globalsolaratlas.info/., here is a map of the best countries for solar: Unsurprisingly we have the deserts in Africa, the Middle East, and Chile. The map on the source website has much more precise intra-country data, so it is definitely worth checking out. Wind Potential Based on data from https://globalwindatlas.info/, here is a map of the best countries for wind:

Wednesday, February 1, 2023 | 2 minutes Read
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Applying Core Mental Models to Strategy Consulting

As a Farnam Street post states: Mental models are how we understand the world. A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. The page provides a long list of mental models, with summaries, and books that go into further detail. According to FS, there are nine “core” mental models: The Map is Not the Territory Circle of Competence First Principles Thinking Thought Experiment Second-Order Thinking Probabilistic Thinking Inversion Occam’s Razor Hanlon’s Razor Given I’m a consultant, I thought it could be fun to invent a consulting scenario utilising all these. Note this is entirely a creation and has no relation to any client I or my company have worked with (not that I know of anyway!)

Wednesday, January 11, 2023 | 4 minutes Read