Impact of atmospheric variability on a solar based power system in West Africa
This dissertation project is part of the research field Energy Meteorology. It connects two disciplines, meteorology and renewable energies.
As solar energy will play a key role in the future sustainable energy-mix, this technology is analyzed concerning the impact of atmospheric variability in this dissertation. Thereby, West Africa is used as study region for several reasons. First, it is a region with high solar insolation year around with an average annual sum of global irradiance up to 2400 kWh/m2. Second, the region is suffering from a lack in electricity as well as energy infrastructure. Thus, the energy system there needs to be expanded to serve current and future demand. Finally, a typical annual cloud cycle exists in south and central West Africa due to the West African Monsoon (WAM). This implicates regular dry and wet seasons, with frequent dust outbreaks and therewith extreme aerosol loads during the dry season. A detailed analysis of extreme aerosol loads, being one of the major uncertainty for climate models, can be undertaken for this region.
In this thesis three major solar irradiance data sources are used to answer the central question: “What are the challenges for a solar based power system in West Africa?” Existing ground-based measurements are used to validate models and satellite retrievals. A radiative transfer model is used to analyze the aerosol impact at several locations where ground-based measurements of aerosol optical properties are available. Satellite retrievals are used to investigate the long-term trend and variability of solar irradiance and its implications on photovoltaic power.
- Energy Meteorology
- Solar power
- West Africa
since 04/2016
PhD student at University of Cologne, Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology
since 01/2015
University of Applied Science Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, research assistant
10/2010 – 09/2013
Technical University Berlin, Master of Science in renewable energy systems
09/2011 – 02/2012
Polytechnic University of Valencia, ERASMUS program
10/2006 – 06/2010
Humboldt University Berlin, Bachelor of Science in Physics
Peer-review
Ina Neher, Tina Buchmann, Susanne Crewell, Bernhard Pospichal, Stefanie Meilinger. Impact of atmospheric aerosols on solar power, In: Meteorologische Zeitschrift, Volume 28 No. 4, 2019, Pages 305-321.
Ina Neher, Tina Buchmann, Susanne Crewell, Bernd Evers-Dietze, Klaus Pfeilsticker, Bernhard Pospichal, Christopher Schirrmeister, Stefanie Meilinger. Impact of atmospheric aerosols on photovoltaic energy production – Scenario for the Sahel zone, In: Energy Procedia, Volume 125, 2017, Pages 170-179.
Huber, Veronika, Ina Neher, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, Kathrin Höfner, and Joachim Schellnhuber. 2014. Will the World Run out of Land? A Kaya-Type Decomposition to Study Past Trends of Cropland Expansion, Environmental Research Letters 9(2).
Presentations
Ina Neher, Tina Buchmann, Susanne Crewell, Stefanie Meilinger. Impact of atmospheric aerosols on solar power production – Dust outbreak in West Africa, At ICEM, June 2019, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Ina Neher, Tina Buchmann, Susanne Crewell, Stefanie Meilinger. Impact of atmospheric aerosols on solar power production – Dust outbreak in West Africa, At EMS Annual Meeting, September 2018, Budapest, Hungary.
Ina Neher, Tina Buchmann, Susanne Crewell, Stefanie Meilinger. Impact of aerosols on solar energy production in Niamey, Niger, At Fachtagung Energiemeteorologie, June 2018, Goslar, Germany.
Ina Neher, Tina Buchmann, Susanne Crewell, and Stefanie Meilinger. Impact of Aerosols on solar energy production – Scenarios from the Sahel zone (Poster), At EGU General Assembly, April 2017, Vienna, Austria.
Ina Neher, Bernd Evers-Dietze, Evandro Dresch, Tina Buchmann, Stefanie Meilinger, Susanne Crewell. Meteorological impact on solar energy – The relevance of aerosols and model validation (Poster), At 4th GSGS research conference, January 2017, Cologne, Germany.
Ina Neher, Evandro Dresch, Khurshid Hasan, Bernd Evers-Dietze, Dieter Franke and Stefanie Meilinger. Energy meteorology studies investigating the impact of clouds on PV power yields – Coupling a spectrally resolved radiation model and a two-diode model (Poster), At 5th EMS Annual Meeting & 12th European Conference on Applications of Meteorology (ECAM), September 2015, Sofia, Bulgaria.
Ina Neher, Stefanie Meilinger. Energy meteorology studies investigating the impact of land-use changes on solar power – The influence of aerosols and clouds on solar radiation and solar power yields (Poster), At PhD Conference on Earth System Science, March 2015, Mainz, Germany.
Ina Neher, Benjamin Bodirsky. Bioenergy and other drivers of land expansion – A Kaya-like decomposition (Poster), At ALTER-Net’s 8th Summer School on biodiversity and ecosystem services, September 2013, Peyresq, France.
- GI Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg
- GI NRW (Fachgruppe Ressourcen)
- Graduate School of Geoscience, University of Colonge