Accurately forecasting the output of grid connected wind and solar systems is critical to increas... more Accurately forecasting the output of grid connected wind and solar systems is critical to increasing the overall penetration of renewables on the electrical network. This is especially the case in Australia, where there has been a massive increase in solar and wind farms in the last 15 years, as well as in roof top solar, both domestic and commercial. For example, in 2020, 27% of the electricity in Australia was from renewable sources, and in South Australia almost 60% was from wind and solar. In the literature, there has been extensive research reported on solar and wind resource, entailing both point and interval forecasts, but there has been much less focus on the forecasting of output from wind and solar systems. In this review, we canvass both what has been reported and also what gaps remain. In the case of the latter topic, there are numerous aspects that are not well dealt with in the literature. We have added discussion on the value of forecasts, rather than just focusing on...
Heatwaves have a mounted interest in the last decade due to their negative impacts on infrastruct... more Heatwaves have a mounted interest in the last decade due to their negative impacts on infrastructure, the ecosystem and public health. Population exposure to heat stress is substantially influenced by the resilience of the built environment as people spend the majority of their time indoors. Retrofitting the existing building stock could profoundly improve heatwave resilience, however, the current knowledge of the population’s heatwave-resilient retrofitting willingness is limited. An online survey about population perception of, adaptation to and retrofitting against heatwaves was conducted with a representative sample from the Adelaide metropolitan region in March 2015. The survey results about the retrofitting relevant questions presented in this paper suggest that the perceived financial limitations and missing tenant/landlord incentives represent the key barriers to domestic retrofitting. Beyond air-conditioning, the improvement of shadings was the most prevalent retrofitting m...
During summer heatwaves, public spaces are frequently warmer than human thermal comfort preferenc... more During summer heatwaves, public spaces are frequently warmer than human thermal comfort preferences in a majority of Australian Cities. Citizens’ preferences of public space elements and supportive features during heat-stress conditions are under particular focus in this paper. Outdoor activity choices in different thermal environments were surveyed in Adelaide from September 2013 to April 2014. This post-activity survey indicates that necessary, optional and social activities decreased during outdoor heat-stress more than any other thermal conditions. Outdoor activities were chosen the most in neutral and warm thermal environments. Outdoor activity choices were affected significantly by the magnitude of solar radiation. Tree canopy, shading (from buildings or temporary elements) and water features were the most attractive public space features for outdoor participants during heatstress conditions in Adelaide. Meanwhile, essential shopping and dining facilities and social events aff...
Climate change projections indicate a likely 3.8°C increase in the average temperature in Austral... more Climate change projections indicate a likely 3.8°C increase in the average temperature in Australia by 2090. During summer, outdoor heat-stress causes significant thermal discomfort, altering outdoor living preferences. This paper aims to explore the neutral and critical thresholds for outdoor thermal adaptation. The paper reports on outdoor activity change during different outdoor microclimates in Darling harbour, Sydney. Results indicate that outdoor participants adjust their insulation and activity rate by an outdoor neutral thermal threshold of 28-30°C. For the thermal environments hotter than this neutral threshold, the pattern of adaptation shifts towards modification and dismissal of optional, social and ultimately necessary activities. Such thermal adaptation continues to occur by an outdoor critical thermal threshold of 28-48°C. After the critical thermal threshold, outdoor activity prevention becomes the major thermal adaptation strategy. Therefore, to support usability of...
With the recent rapid increase in the use of roof top photovoltaic solar systems worldwide, and a... more With the recent rapid increase in the use of roof top photovoltaic solar systems worldwide, and also, more recently, the dramatic escalation in building grid connected solar farms, especially in Australia, the need for more accurate methods of very short-term forecasting has become a focus of research. The International Energy Agency Tasks 46 and 16 have brought together groups of experts to further this research. In Australia, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency is funding consortia to improve the five minute forecasting of solar farm output, as this is the time scale of the electricity market. The first step in forecasting of either solar radiation or output from solar farms requires the representation of the inherent seasonality. One can characterise the seasonality in climate variables by using either a multiplicative or additive modelling approach. The multiplicative approach with respect to solar radiation can be done by calculating the clearness index, or alternatively est...
We develop a new probabilistic forecasting method for global horizontal irradiation (GHI) by exte... more We develop a new probabilistic forecasting method for global horizontal irradiation (GHI) by extending our previous bootstrap method to a case of an exponentially decaying heteroscedastic model for tracking dynamics in solar radiance. Our previous method catered for the global systematic variation in variance of solar radiation, whereas our new method also caters for the local variation in variance. We test the performance of our new probabilistic forecasting method against our old probabilistic forecasting method at three locations: Adelaide, Darwin, and Mildura. These locations are chosen to represent three distinct climates. The prediction interval coverage probability, prediction interval normalized averaged width and Winkler score results from our new probabilistic forecasting method are encouraging. Our new method performs better than our previous method at Adelaide and Mildura; regions with a higher proportion of clear-sky days, whereas our previous method performs better tha...
This study investigates the land surface temperature (LST) distribution from thermal infrared dat... more This study investigates the land surface temperature (LST) distribution from thermal infrared data for analyzing the characteristics of surface coverage using the Vegetation-Impervious-Soil (VIS) approach. A set of ten images, obtained from Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper, between 2001 and 2010, were used to study the urban environmental conditions of 47 neighborhoods of Porto Alegre city, Brazil. Porto Alegre has had the smallest population growth rate of all 27 state capitals in the last two decades in Brazil, with an increase of 11.55% in inhabitants from 1,263 million in 1991 to 1,409 million in 2010. We applied the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) theory in order to test the influence of the economically-related scenario on the spatial nature of social-environmental arrangement of the city at neighborhood scale. Our results suggest that the economically-related scenario exerts a non-negligible influence on the physically driven characteristics of the urban environmental conditions a...
Accurately forecasting the output of grid connected wind and solar systems is critical to increas... more Accurately forecasting the output of grid connected wind and solar systems is critical to increasing the overall penetration of renewables on the electrical network. This is especially the case in Australia, where there has been a massive increase in solar and wind farms in the last 15 years, as well as in roof top solar, both domestic and commercial. For example, in 2020, 27% of the electricity in Australia was from renewable sources, and in South Australia almost 60% was from wind and solar. In the literature, there has been extensive research reported on solar and wind resource, entailing both point and interval forecasts, but there has been much less focus on the forecasting of output from wind and solar systems. In this review, we canvass both what has been reported and also what gaps remain. In the case of the latter topic, there are numerous aspects that are not well dealt with in the literature. We have added discussion on the value of forecasts, rather than just focusing on...
Heatwaves have a mounted interest in the last decade due to their negative impacts on infrastruct... more Heatwaves have a mounted interest in the last decade due to their negative impacts on infrastructure, the ecosystem and public health. Population exposure to heat stress is substantially influenced by the resilience of the built environment as people spend the majority of their time indoors. Retrofitting the existing building stock could profoundly improve heatwave resilience, however, the current knowledge of the population’s heatwave-resilient retrofitting willingness is limited. An online survey about population perception of, adaptation to and retrofitting against heatwaves was conducted with a representative sample from the Adelaide metropolitan region in March 2015. The survey results about the retrofitting relevant questions presented in this paper suggest that the perceived financial limitations and missing tenant/landlord incentives represent the key barriers to domestic retrofitting. Beyond air-conditioning, the improvement of shadings was the most prevalent retrofitting m...
During summer heatwaves, public spaces are frequently warmer than human thermal comfort preferenc... more During summer heatwaves, public spaces are frequently warmer than human thermal comfort preferences in a majority of Australian Cities. Citizens’ preferences of public space elements and supportive features during heat-stress conditions are under particular focus in this paper. Outdoor activity choices in different thermal environments were surveyed in Adelaide from September 2013 to April 2014. This post-activity survey indicates that necessary, optional and social activities decreased during outdoor heat-stress more than any other thermal conditions. Outdoor activities were chosen the most in neutral and warm thermal environments. Outdoor activity choices were affected significantly by the magnitude of solar radiation. Tree canopy, shading (from buildings or temporary elements) and water features were the most attractive public space features for outdoor participants during heatstress conditions in Adelaide. Meanwhile, essential shopping and dining facilities and social events aff...
Climate change projections indicate a likely 3.8°C increase in the average temperature in Austral... more Climate change projections indicate a likely 3.8°C increase in the average temperature in Australia by 2090. During summer, outdoor heat-stress causes significant thermal discomfort, altering outdoor living preferences. This paper aims to explore the neutral and critical thresholds for outdoor thermal adaptation. The paper reports on outdoor activity change during different outdoor microclimates in Darling harbour, Sydney. Results indicate that outdoor participants adjust their insulation and activity rate by an outdoor neutral thermal threshold of 28-30°C. For the thermal environments hotter than this neutral threshold, the pattern of adaptation shifts towards modification and dismissal of optional, social and ultimately necessary activities. Such thermal adaptation continues to occur by an outdoor critical thermal threshold of 28-48°C. After the critical thermal threshold, outdoor activity prevention becomes the major thermal adaptation strategy. Therefore, to support usability of...
With the recent rapid increase in the use of roof top photovoltaic solar systems worldwide, and a... more With the recent rapid increase in the use of roof top photovoltaic solar systems worldwide, and also, more recently, the dramatic escalation in building grid connected solar farms, especially in Australia, the need for more accurate methods of very short-term forecasting has become a focus of research. The International Energy Agency Tasks 46 and 16 have brought together groups of experts to further this research. In Australia, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency is funding consortia to improve the five minute forecasting of solar farm output, as this is the time scale of the electricity market. The first step in forecasting of either solar radiation or output from solar farms requires the representation of the inherent seasonality. One can characterise the seasonality in climate variables by using either a multiplicative or additive modelling approach. The multiplicative approach with respect to solar radiation can be done by calculating the clearness index, or alternatively est...
We develop a new probabilistic forecasting method for global horizontal irradiation (GHI) by exte... more We develop a new probabilistic forecasting method for global horizontal irradiation (GHI) by extending our previous bootstrap method to a case of an exponentially decaying heteroscedastic model for tracking dynamics in solar radiance. Our previous method catered for the global systematic variation in variance of solar radiation, whereas our new method also caters for the local variation in variance. We test the performance of our new probabilistic forecasting method against our old probabilistic forecasting method at three locations: Adelaide, Darwin, and Mildura. These locations are chosen to represent three distinct climates. The prediction interval coverage probability, prediction interval normalized averaged width and Winkler score results from our new probabilistic forecasting method are encouraging. Our new method performs better than our previous method at Adelaide and Mildura; regions with a higher proportion of clear-sky days, whereas our previous method performs better tha...
This study investigates the land surface temperature (LST) distribution from thermal infrared dat... more This study investigates the land surface temperature (LST) distribution from thermal infrared data for analyzing the characteristics of surface coverage using the Vegetation-Impervious-Soil (VIS) approach. A set of ten images, obtained from Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper, between 2001 and 2010, were used to study the urban environmental conditions of 47 neighborhoods of Porto Alegre city, Brazil. Porto Alegre has had the smallest population growth rate of all 27 state capitals in the last two decades in Brazil, with an increase of 11.55% in inhabitants from 1,263 million in 1991 to 1,409 million in 2010. We applied the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) theory in order to test the influence of the economically-related scenario on the spatial nature of social-environmental arrangement of the city at neighborhood scale. Our results suggest that the economically-related scenario exerts a non-negligible influence on the physically driven characteristics of the urban environmental conditions a...
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Papers by John Boland