360° Timelapse at NREL's Solar Radiation Research Laboratory (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video 360° Timelapse at NREL's Solar Radiation Research Laboratory.

The workshop provided NREL an opportunity to engage with industry representatives to explore research opportunities for the ARIES platform in the field of energy storage.

 

Video timelapse of a 360° view of radiometers under a changing sky. Text on screen fades in and out:

Welcome to the largest collection of continuously operating radiometers in the world. They are designed to precisely measure the sun's energy.

They are located in Golden, Colorado, at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

NREL researchers have been measuring the sun at this location since 1981.

These instruments track the sun very closely, measuring only light coming directly from the sun, called direct irradiance.

These instruments are always shaded from the sun, measuring light that is scattered by the atmosphere, called diffuse irradiance.

And these instruments measure both the direct and diffuse irradiance, in a wide range of wavelengths.

The publicly available data supports an $84 billion American solar energy industry and informs energy analysis and modeling at NREL and around the United States.