Voltaic’s customers power their industrial IoT applications with our solar panels and solar power systems, and many of these products have a positive climate impact by:
- Reducing fuel consumption
- Improving crop yields
- Tracking the health of our cities, or
- Monitoring critical environmental variables
During Climate Week NYC 2024 Voltaic showcased several of these solar powered applications at The New Climate Futures 2024, hosted by Newlab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Here’s the rundown of our showcase:
Sofar Ocean
The product we showed off at the event was Sofar Ocean’s Ocean Sensing Platform – Spotter. Hundreds of Spotter buoys comprise a global network that collects data to improve forecasts and voyage optimization, cutting emissions by an average of 4-6%. Each day, the Sofar network makes more than 1.5 million observations of waves and other ocean variables including wind, sea surface temperature, atmospheric pressure, and GPS, and sends the data to the cloud via cellular or satellite communication. This information allows the team of ocean scientists to build innovative models that make forecasts that are up to 50% more accurate than traditional models.
When sourcing components that could withstand various marine environments, from ice to high latitudes to extreme heat, Sofar selected Voltaic to provide the durable 2 watt solar panels that recharge the Spotter’s onboard battery.
The Spotter Platform is just part of Sofar’s effort to preserve ocean health.
Clarity
Clarity wants to make it easier for cities and industries to measure and understand air pollution issues with its IoT-based air quality monitoring technology. Clarity has networks of hundreds to thousands of continuously calibrated air quality sensors that provide real-time air quality data.
The Black Carbon Module is part of Clarity’s sensor networks and is used to indicate the presence of this harmful component of particulate matter, which impacts human health, agricultural productivity, and global warming. The module is a real-time 5-wavelength UV-IR Black Carbon monitor designed to be installed outdoors on street poles and along fence lines. While the sensor also collects relative humidity and temperature data, the spectrum measurement provides insight into the composition of light-absorbing carbonaceous particles. The collected data helps observers distinguish the optical signatures of various combustion sources, such as diesel, woodsmoke, biomass, and tobacco.
Clarity chose Voltaic’s 100 Watt CORE Solar System to power the Black Carbon Module.
Hohonu
We recently wrote about our collaboration with Hohonu, a company dedicated to real-time water monitoring, and the not-for-profit Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, which manages the Brooklyn Bridge Park in our Voltaic Powers Hohonu Sensor for Real-Time Tide Monitoring in New York Harbor blog post.
Hohonu, which works to democratize access to real-time water data, currently provides 1.8 million+ hours of monitoring across 100 locations and 15 states, including the sensor Voltaic installed on Pier 3 of the Brooklyn Bridge Park. The data is freely available through TideCast for iOS:
The Hohonu’s HTG-PB2 solar-powered ultrasonic tidal gauge connects to the cloud through cellular (2G/3G/LTE) communication and refreshes live data every six minutes. The incorporated Voltaic solar panel recharges the sensor’s battery, making the system self-sufficient.
Live Dashboard:
BirdWeather PUC
The BirdWeather PUC (Portable Universe Codec) is an AI-powered bioacoustics platform that continuously monitors the sounds, identifying bird songs in real time. PUC has environmental sensors, including (Temp, Humidity, Pressure, Air Quality, tVOC, CO2, and a Spectral Light Sensor), dual microphones, WiFi/BLE, GPS, and a built-in neural engine, all in a weatherproof enclosure. This citizen-science IoT device, which sprung from one family’s pandemic fascination with the wildlife outside their home, facilitates easy recording and automatic cloud processing of bird sounds, aiding conservation efforts and ecological studies.
The cloud server uses the BirdNET neural network (a joint project between the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Chemnitz University of Technology) to process all audio soundscapes from the PUC, featuring:
- Over 6000 global bird species!
- Man-made sources (e.g. fireworks, engines)
- Non-avian species (e.g. coyote, dog, fox, squirrel, frogs, insects)
- Automatic removal of any soundscapes with human vocal detections
Studying birds and bird populations is a way to further our understanding of our ecosystems. Changes in bird populations and their behavior can tell us about the impacts of climate change, drought, weather, and habitat change.
The PUC can be powered by Voltaic’s V50 or the V35 (Shine Solar battery) and P105.
In our Solar for BirdWeather BioAcoustic Platform blog post, you can read about how we installed our own solar-powered PUC.
FloodNet
FloodNet is a cooperative of communities, researchers, and New York City government agencies working to better understand the frequency, severity, and impacts of flooding in New York City. Real-time flood sensors were developed by the FloodSense project at NYU and the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) to provide information on the presence, frequency, and depth of hyperlocal street-level flood events to a range of stakeholders, including policymakers, government agencies, citizens, emergency response teams, community advocacy groups, and researchers. The sensors and gateway are solar-powered. Sensors powered by Voltaic 0.3 Watt solar panels communicate status to the network using LoRaWAN, and the solar-powered gateway sends the data to FloodNet, which is then published for the public to view and analyze.
In our blog, you can read about how we solar-powered a LoRa Gateway on The Things Network to support FloodNet.
University of Florida
University of Florida’s Assistant Professor Christopher Dutton is an ecologist who works with academic, non-governmental organizations, and governmental agencies to better understand the causes and consequences of ecological change through the lens of animal and environmental microbiomes.
Dutton and his team have recently been studying how carbon fluxes change over the terrestrial-aquatic interface as wetlands fill and dry. The DOE-funded project uses sensors and a solar-powered Helium LoRaWAN gateway to track optical dissolved oxygen, pH, CO2 in the air, air temperature, humidity, dissolved CO2 in water, soil moisture/temp/cond, ORP, and CH4.
The Helium gateway is powered by Voltaic’s 50 Watt CORE Solar System.
Need help matching a panel to an appropriate gateway or battery? Contact us so that we can help you size your system and help you figure out all the details.
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