Tag: solar

The undergraduate students from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) didn’t just build a race car from scratch—they built a world-record-holding solar electric race car: the Sunswift 7. In three years, they engineered everything from the aerodynamic design to the software used to run the car. After going live with their telemetry system on AWS, the racing team set a new Guinness World Record for the World’s Fastest Electric Vehicle going over 1,000km (621 miles) on a single charge.

This week at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit Washington, DC, we announced the findings of a 10-year economic study about AWS’s presence in Virginia. The report shows the impact that can happen when government and industry work together to create growth opportunities for communities. One component of this that is worth re-highlighting is the positive impact that Amazon solar investments are having and will have on the local economy in Virginia.

Today AWS announced it is expanding its collaboration with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to make environmental data easier to access and use. A new agreement with NOAA builds upon the work started when AWS first collaborated with NOAA on the Big Data Project in 2015. Users will now be able to access new, authoritative NOAA data within AWS without needing to download and store their own copies.

Solcast produces real-time, historical and forecast estimates of the available solar radiation resources around the globe. Altogether, this requires processing imagery from five geostationary weather satellites, which take snapshots of the Earth from space every 5-15 minutes. These images can be as fine as 1 kilometer in spatial resolution and are re-captured and transmitted as frequently as every five minutes – a large volume of data. A single third-generation weather satellite in orbit over the United States such as the GOES-16 generates nearly two terabytes (TB) of data each month.